Moreover, the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth; and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, which you or your fathers have not known. (Deuteronomy 28:64)

WhenIsraelreturns to God and obeys His Torah, in accordance with the Mosaic covenant, God will bring His covenant people back to the Land of the covenant.

If your outcasts are at the ends of the earth, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back. (Deuteronomy 30:4)

Ultimately, everything God does through His people will bring Himself glory; so how does the return ofIsraelto the Land bring God glory? An obedientIsraelcould boast in their obedience, right? How can God causeIsraelto become obedient to Torah (on a national level) and yet retain the glory for Himself? It’s my opinion that one of the reasons why Israel, as a nation, has never fully obeyed God, and thus elicit the blessings of the Mosaic covenant, is so that God can get the glory for Himself when He finally changes the hearts of all of Israel and allows them to become obedient. This, I believe, is the New Covenant:

31″Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 32not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.33″But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34″They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

A parallel passage to this is in Ezekiel 36:

22″Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you went. 23″I will vindicate the holiness of My great name which has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned in their midst Then the nations will know that I am the LORD,” declares the Lord GOD, “when I prove Myself holy among you in their sight. 24″For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. 25″Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. 26″Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27″I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. 28″You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:22-28)

So, the New Covenant is a national covenant where God, by His power alone, brings about the salvation of the entire nation. Salvation results in obedience to the Torah and this will result inIsraelfinally, on a national level, receiving the blessings of the Mosaic covenant. This means that God will gatherIsraelback to the Land.

11Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished We are completely cut off.’ 12″Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel. 13″Then you will know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, My people. 14″I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the LORD, have spoken and done it,” declares the LORD.’” (Ezekiel 37:11-14)

21″Say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I will take the sons of Israel from among the nations where they have gone, and I will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land; 22and I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king will be king for all of them; and they will no longer be two nations and no longer be divided into two kingdoms. 23″They will no longer defile themselves with their idols, or with their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions; but I will deliver them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them. And they will be My people, and I will be their God. 24″My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd; and they will walk in My ordinances and keep My statutes and observe them. 25″They will live on the land that I gave to Jacob My servant, in which your fathers lived; and they will live on it, they, and their sons and their sons’ sons, forever; and David My servant will be their prince forever. 26″I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant with them And I will place them and multiply them, and will set My sanctuary in their midst forever. 27″My dwelling place also will be with them; and I will be their God, and they will be My people. 28″And the nations will know that I am the LORD who sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary is in their midst forever.”‘” (Ezekiel 37:21-28)

From Ezekiel alone we learn that God will changeIsraelon a national level, giving them His Spirit and causing them to obey the Torah. God will resurrect all the dead who had faith and will gather them to theLandofIsrael. The Messiah (represented by the name “David”) will reign over them and God will dwell among them forever.

Let’s look at how Jeremiah intertwines the coming of the Messiah with gathering ofIsraelback to theLandofIsrael.

1″Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of My pasture!” declares the LORD. 2Therefore thus says the LORD God of Israel concerning the shepherds who are tending My people: “You have scattered My flock and driven them away, and have not attended to them; behold, I am about to attend to you for the evil of your deeds,” declares the LORD. 3″Then I Myself will gather the remnant of My flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and bring them back to their pasture, and they will be fruitful and multiply. 4″I will also raise up shepherds over them and they will tend them; and they will not be afraid any longer, nor be terrified, nor will any be missing,” declares the LORD. 5″Behold, the days are coming,” declares the LORD, ”When I will raise up for David a righteous Branch; and He will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land. 6″In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely; and this is His name by which He will be called, ’The LORD our righteousness.’ 7″Therefore behold, the days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when they will no longer say, ‘As the LORD lives, who brought up the sons of Israel from the land of Egypt,’ 8but, ‘As the LORD lives, who brought up and led back the descendants of the household of Israel from the north land and from all the countries where I had driven them.’ Then they will live on their own soil.” (Jeremiah 23:1-8)

Isaiah, speaking of a time when God will punish Satan, couples the sound of the shofar with the gathering ofIsraelback to the Land.

13It will come about also in that day that a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were perishing in the land of Assyria and who were scattered in the land of Egypt will come and worship the LORD in the holy mountain at Jerusalem. (Isaiah 27:13)

The Jewish people base their hope of a coming Messiah, the resurrection of the dead and the gathering of scatteredIsraelto the Land on these passages and others like them. Jewish tradition understands the gathering ofIsraelto be a fulfillment of Deuteronomy 30:4. The Targum Jonathan, a first century Aramaic paraphrase of the Tanakh (an ancient version of the Message bible), translates this verse as follows:

Though you may be dispersed unto the ends of the heavens, from there will the Word of the Lord gather you together by the hand of Elijah the great priest, and from there will He bring you by the hand of the King Messiah. (Targum Yonatan on Deuteronomy 30:4)

The promise of the gathering ofIsraelto the Land is even a part of the daily prayers and is prayed three times a day:

Blast the great shofar for our freedom, and lift a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us together from the four corners of the earth. Blessed are You, O Lord, who gathers the scattered ones of His people Israel. (Tenth Benediction of the Shemoneh Esrei)

In the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanon says, “The ingathering of the exiles is as important as the day when heaven and earth were created.” (b.Pesachim 88a)

Now let’s look to the words of the Master Himself to see how He said it would happen. Let’s specifically note the chronology of the events:

29″But immediately after the tribulation of those days THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED, AND THE MOON WILL NOT GIVE ITS LIGHT, AND THE STARS WILL FALL from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 30″And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the SON OF MAN COMING ON THE CLOUDS OF THE SKY with power and great glory. 31″And He will send forth His angels with A GREAT TRUMPET and THEY WILL GATHER TOGETHER His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other. (Matthew 24:29-31)

The Master says that after the tribulation everyone will see His return and it will be accompanied with great glory. In other words, nobody’s going to miss this; it will be obvious to everyone. Following His obvious and visible return will be the sound of a great shofar and the gathering of His elect from around the world. These words are completely in line with the words of the Prophets that we have just read.

What can we conclude after looking at these passages from the Prophets and the words of the Master? The resurrection and subsequent gathering ofIsraelfollows the visible and glorious return of the Messiah. This event is accompanied with a shofar blast. What we haven’t seen in any of these passages is mention of a disappearing of Believers to heaven. Let’s now take a look at two important passages from Paul’s epistles:

51Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, 52in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. 54But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “DEATH IS SWALLOWED UP in victory. (1 Corinthians 15:51-54)

Here, Paul is commenting on the passages from the Prophets regarding the resurrection and explains that at the resurrection, those who are alive will not have to die but will rather be instantly changed into immortal bodies. Notice he connects the blast of a shofar (specifically the “last” trumpet) with the resurrection, as did the Prophets. The only new thing Paul introduces is the answer to what was probably a common question among the Jewish communities: What happens to those who are alive at the time of the resurrection? His answer is that those who are alive will not have to die but will be instantly changed into the immortal state. Now, let’s look at 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 and see what he teaches there:

13But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. 14For if we believe that Yeshua died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Yeshua.

We can note that the context of this passage is the resurrection of the dead.

15For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.

What does Paul mean when he says “by the word of the Lord?” Is he referring to a revelation he received directly from God? Possibly but there’s also the possibility that Paul simply understood what he was about to say was from the Tanakh and that the Spirit simply illumined him to see it in the context of Yeshua. We see that Paul is connecting the coming of Yeshua with the resurrection of the dead. The ones (the Believers) who are alive at the coming of Yeshua will not precede those who have died in Him (died believing in the promise). Precede them in what? Again, the context of this passage is the resurrection. Therefore, Paul is simply saying that the ones who have died in Messiah will be the first to rise and subsequent to that (essentially at the same time), those who are alive will transform into the immortal state as well. He’s saying the same thing he said in 1 Corinthians 15.

16For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Messiah will rise first.

Paul connects the return of the Messiah with the resurrection of the dead. Yeshua will descend from heaven. There will be a shout and a trumpet (shofar) blast, at which time the Believers from all past generations will resurrect from the dead. Once again the shofar blast is connected to the resurrection of the dead. Also, there is something about the shout of Messiah and resurrection. He shouted for Lazarus to get out of the tomb and he did. Yeshua shouted while on the cross and some of the saints rose from their grave. Here, in the end, Yeshua will descend from heaven with a shout and all of the dead that are in Him will rise.

17Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. 18Therefore comfort one another with these words.

The believers who are alive at that time will be caught up. The word rapture is derived from the Latin word “rapiemu” which means “carried off” or “carried up.” The Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible, translates the Greek word “harpazo,” which means “to seize” or “to carry off,” with “rapiemu,” so it essentially has the same meaning. Therefore, apparently, the concept of being “caught up in the clouds” is a Biblical concept.

Being caught up together with the newly resurrected believers, together we will meet Yeshua in the air. Paul concludes that we will always be with Yeshua. There’s no mention of believers being taken away to heaven. This passage does connect, though, the resurrection of the dead with the coming of Yeshua and apparently there will be a gathering of all those who had faith in the Messiah in the air at the Master’s descending. Apparently, we will meet Yeshua and the now resurrected believers who were dead “in Messiah” previously. Paul does not say where we will be when we are “with the Master always.”

It seems clear though that Paul is speaking of the same events that the Prophets and Yeshua were talking about: the resurrection and gathering ofIsraelto the Land by the Messiah, which is accompanied by the sound of the shofar. But what about the part where he says we will be “caught up.” It’s possible that Paul is borrowing the imagery of Isaiah 60:8, which says:

8″Who are these who fly like a cloud and like the doves to their lattices? (Isaiah 60:8)

The Targum (the ancient Aramaic paraphrase of the Tanakh) understood this passage to be referring to the gathering ofIsraelback to the Land and renders Isaiah 60:8 this way:

“The, captivity of Israel, who are gathered together, and come to their own land, as doves that return to their dove houses.” (Isaiah 60:8, Targum)

Whether this is simply illustrative language or we will actually be caught up to meet Messiah in the air doesn’t really matter. The point is that when he says we will be “caught up,” Paul is referring to the gathering of those of faith who are alive at the time of the Messiah’s coming.

This line of thinking is not outside of Jewish though. The great middle ages commentator Rashi used Isaiah 27 to comment on Deuteronomy 30:3:

Great is the day of the ingathering of the exiles, and it will come about with much difficulty, as if God Himself will be obliged to take hold of each person with His hands, each one from his place, like the matter which is spoken of [in Isaiah], “And you will be gathered up one by one, O sons of Israel. [It will come about also in that day that a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were … scattered … will come …]” (Rashi on Deuteronomy 30:3 quoting Isaiah 27:12[–13])

Just to be clear, I include righteous Gentiles as being a part ofIsrael. All of these passages include those Gentiles of genuine faith. The Bible does not make a distinction between believingIsraeland believing Gentiles. Believing Gentiles are a part ofIsrael, therefore, only those Jews and Gentiles who have exercised genuine faith over the centuries will be the ones who will rise on that day. And only those Jews and Gentiles of genuine faith who are alive will be instantly transformed and caught up with the newly resurrected saints. We can expect to see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Peter, Paul, John and many more resurrected and gathered to meet Yeshua in the air. Lord willing, those of us who are alive will be subsequently caught up with them and will be gathered to theLandofIsraelwhere we will reign with Messiah forever (may we see it soon and in our day!). It’s interesting that Isaiah foretold of Gentiles being gathered with the saints ofIsrael:

8The Lord GOD, who gathers the dispersed of Israel, declares, “Yet others I will gather to them, to those already gathered.” (Isaiah 56:8)

And don’t forget the words of Yeshua:

11″I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; (Matthew 8:11)

16″I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd. (John 10:16)

The exclamation of “Next Year inJerusalem!” should take on a whole new meaning at Passover. The “blessed hope” of the return of the Messiah is not to escape to heaven. Instead, we will be gathered toIsraelto live in immortal bodies for all eternity. The so-called rapture is the gathering ofIsraelto the Land promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

As an appendix, let’s look at some passages from the parables of Yeshua that are usually used to prove the traditional idea of the rapture:

Being Taken Away

37″For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. 38″For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, 39and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be. 40″Then there will be two men in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. 41″Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one will be left. (Matthew 24:37–41)

34″I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other will be left. 35″There will be two women grinding at the same place; one will be taken and the other will be left. 36["Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other will be left."] 37And answering they said to Him, “Where, Lord?” And He said to them, “Where the body is, there also the vultures will be gathered.” (Luke 17:34-37)

These passages are set within the context of Yeshua telling His disciples about His coming. Apparently, just like in the days of Noah, Yeshua will return at a time when people will be living their lives (specifically in sin) like usual. In other words, life is normal for them and sin is the routine. The Messiah’s coming will be like a thief in the night. His judgment will be unexpected. When Yeshua says that one will be taken and one will remain, He’s actually referring to the sinner being taken away! His disciples asked Him where they will be taken and Yeshua answers that they will be taken away to where their bodies will be feasted on by vultures. This does not necessarily mean that the sinners will be literally taken away but it certainly denotes judgment (punished, presumably, by death). Just as the flood washed (took) away the sinners, so too will Yeshua “take away” the sinner upon His return. There seems to be evidence of this in the book of Revelation.

17Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he cried out with a loud voice, saying to all the birds which fly in midheaven, “Come, assemble for the great supper of God, 18so that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great.” 21And the rest were killed with the sword which came from the mouth of Him who sat on the horse, and all the birds were filled with their flesh. (Revelation 19:17–18, 21)

Does that mean that Believers will be going through the time of tribulation preceding the Messiah’s return? It appears so, as the Master’s parable indicates:

24Jesus presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25″But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went away. 26″But when the wheat sprouted and bore grain, then the tares became evident also. 27″The slaves of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ 28″And he said to them, ‘An enemy has done this!’ The slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us, then, to go and gather them up?’ 29″But he said, ‘No; for while you are gathering up the tares, you may uproot the wheat with them. 30′Allow both to grow together until the harvest; and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather up the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them up; but gather the wheat into my barn.”‘” (Matthew 13:24-30)

Most Christians unknowingly read and interpret the Bible through the lenses of Dispensation Theology. Tonight’s study is not meant to be a comprehensive look at Dispensation Theology but rather a look at the Bible to see if some of the main elements of dispensational thinking are true. Distilled down to its core, Dispensation Theology is the idea that God dealt with people differently than He has since the death and resurrection of the Messiah. The commonly held pre-conceived premise is that before the coming of the Messiah, God saved sinners through their obedience to God’s commandments and through the animal sacrificial service. However, since the coming of the Messiah, God has saved sinners as a matter of His grace through the atoning death and resurrection of the Messiah, a reality which we accept by faith. In this way, believers are no longer obligated to keep the commandments of the Torah since there is now a better a way of salvation. In fact, to some, the keeping of the commandments of the Torah is a slap in the face of the Messiah who suffered for our salvation. With all this in mind, Christians can make a definite distinction between what was for the Old Testament, the time before the coming of the Messiah, and that which is for the New Testament, the time after the death and resurrection of the Messiah. Has there really been two ways of salvation and is there a distinction to be made between the time before and after the Messiah’s coming?

Before we begin, we should define what we mean when we say Torah. The word “torah” is a Hebrew word that means “teaching” or “instruction.” It is usually translated in our English Bibles as “law” and it primarily refers to the first five books of the Bible (Genesis through Deuteronomy). When we say that Christians think that the Torah has been changed or done away with, however, we are obviously specifically referring to aspects of the Torah such as the Sabbath, holidays, kosher laws and more. No sane Christian thinks that the whole of the Torah is completely irrelevant or done away with, since the Torah is the basis of our whole faith. We are simply taking it one step further in saying that all of the commandments in the Torah are still in place and are relevant to God’s people today as they were when they were given.
1) WHO WERE JESUS AND THE APOSTLES?

It is popular to hear the phrase “what would Jesus do?” but a better question would be “what did Jesus do?” The reason why this is a better question is because being a disciple of Jesus means doing what Jesus did. The Apostle John put it this way: “…the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked” (1 John 2:6). The first thing we need to realize is that Jesus and the Apostles were not Christians in the traditional sense. In other words, Jesus and the Apostles did not start nor did they intend to have their followers be a part of a new religion distinct from the life of faith practiced by Israel. Instead, they were Jewish and they kept the Torah according to the traditions of Israel. The Apostolic Scriptures tell us about Yochanan, a man of priestly descent, who called his fellow Israelites to repent of their sin. Yochanan led the way for Yeshua of Nazareth to begin his teaching ministry. Yeshua, the son of Miriam and Yoseph, taught Torah to the people of Israel and also called for repentance. Yeshua had twelve disciples, with Shimon Kefa, Yochanan and Ya’acov being his closest disciples.

Yeshua and his disciples were all zealous, Torah-observant Jews. Yeshua kept the Sabbath and participated in the Torah and Prophets readings in the synagogue every week. It says in Luke: “and He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written” (Luke 4:16-17). Just as Jewish people have done for millennia, Yeshua spent his Sabbath mornings in the synagogue hearing the Scriptures read. The disciples attended synagogue with their Master, as it says in Mark: “they went into Capernaum; and immediately on the Sabbath He entered the synagogue and began to teach” (Mark 1:21). In fact, even though their Master had died and was ready to be buried, Luke said of the disciples: “they returned and prepared spices and perfumes and on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). This doesn’t sound like the disciples were ever taught by Yeshua to disregard keeping the Sabbath! Paul, known among his Jewish brothers as Sha’ul, also kept the Sabbath and spent his Sabbath mornings in the synagogue (see Acts 17:2-3, 18:3-5). Also, the brother of Yeshua, Ya’acov, in his epistle, assumed that the believers he was writing to attended synagogue since he said: “…if a man comes into your synagogue with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes…” (James 2:2). The writer to the Hebrews said that “…there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Hebrews 4:9-10), which even if this is to be taken purely in a spiritual sense, these verses only have meaning to those keeping the Sabbath, since the weekly Sabbath pictures the rest we will enter in the Messianic era. There is no place in the entirety of the Apostolic Scriptures that shows Yeshua and the Apostles disregarding the Sabbath for a new day of rest and worship.

In addition to the clear evidence that Yeshua and the Apostles kept the Sabbath and kept it in accordance with the traditions of Israel, the Apostolic Scriptures also clearly show Yeshua and the Apostles engaging in other aspects of the Torah. Luke 22:15-20 clearly shows Yeshua and the disciples celebrating the Passover seder, with the Master infusing additional meaning into the eating of unleavened bread and the four cups of wine. 1 Corinthians 5:6-8 contains the Apostle Paul’s teaching on the spiritual application of Passover and an exhortation to keep Passover and the days of Unleavened Bread with such an attitude. Of course, we all know that the Apostolic community kept Shavu’ot, also known in Greek as Pentecost, since they were gathered at the Temple during Shavu’ot in Acts 2 (see Acts 2:1; cf. Acts 20:16, 1 Corinthians 16:8-9). There is also a mention of Yom Kippur in Acts 27:9 as a time marker, showing that the Apostolic community considered the calendar of Israel to be their calendar. Additionally, there is mention of Sukkot, the feast of Booths, in John 7 (see verses 2, 10, 14 and 37), with Yeshua using the festival activities as illustrations in his teachings. Not only did Yeshua and the Apostles keep the Torah-mandated holidays, they also kept the traditional Jewish holidays as well. We see in John 10:22-23 that Yeshua kept Hanukkah, the festival of Dedication. In addition to celebrating the holidays of Israel, there is evidence in the Apostolic Scriptures that Yeshua and the Apostles prayed daily (Acts 2:42, 3:1, 6:4), recited brachot (blessings), which are short prayers or blessings recited to God before doing various activities (Matthew 14:19-20, 26:27 and Acts 27:35), wore tzitzit (Matthew 9:20-21), kept kosher (Acts 10:14), were circumcised (Luke 1:59-60, 2:21, Philippians 3:5, Acts 16:3), offered sacrifices (Acts 24:17) and immersed in mikvaot, which are ritual baths for purposes of ritual purity (Acts 2:41, 9:18).

In any event, even if the Apostolic Scriptures didn’t include all this evidence that Yeshua and the Apostles kept the Torah, in order for them to be legitimate prophets of God, they could not have taught against the Torah. In Deuteronomy 13:1-11 we find that no man claiming to speak for God but who tries to lead the people of Israel into worshipping other gods and away from the commandments of the Torah can be legitimately considered a real prophet. In fact, such a man is to be executed, which in our circumstances would mean at the very least ignoring him. Not only that, the Torah mandates that the kings of Israel uphold and observe the commandments of the Torah (Deuteronomy 17:18-20). Knowing this, we must see understand Yeshua and the Apostles as being faithful Jews who upheld, lived and taught the Torah and we must interpret their teachings with this evidence in mind. If we Yeshua and the Apostle did disregard the Torah and led the people of Israel away from Torah observance, then they are disqualified as being prophets and messengers of God.

2) IS THERE MORE THAN ONE WAY OF BEING SAVED?

In order to dispense with dispensational thinking, we should look to see if the basic presuppositions behind dispensation theology are correct. The main issue at hand is the matter of salvation, whether or not it has always been the same. I think all would agree that all of mankind, from Adam on, are in the same dilemma, namely that our sin separates us from God. Also, all Christians would agree that since the coming of the Messiah, God has graciously accepted sinners on the basis of the Messiah’s death and resurrection, something we take hold of by faith. The question then is, how did God accept sinners previous to the coming of the Messiah? Thankfully, we don’t have to speculate since the Apostles based their teachings regarding salvation on the Tanakh and they looked to the people of faith in the Tanakh as examples of those saved by grace through faith.

Yeshua proclaimed that “…Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56) and the Apostle Paul taught that “…Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS. Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham. The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘ALL THE NATIONS WILL BE BLESSED IN YOU.’ So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer” (Galatians 3:6-9). Abraham is the quintessential believer and according to Apostles our faith should be similar to his. The people of faith previous to the coming of the Messiah were not saved through keeping the Law or through their connection to the Law as Israelites, as it says in Galatians: “…if righteousness could be gained through the law, Messiah died for nothing!” (Galatians 2:21). Think about it, if there was something we could have done ourselves to secure salvation then God would not have had to send His own precious son to suffer and die for our sins. Instead, the people of faith before the coming of Messiah looked forward to his coming. Job, for example, could say by faith: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-26). Job knew that his Redeemer lived and that death would not be the end of him but that God would resurrect him to life. Like us, Job trusted that God would be faithful to His promises and that he would be given immortality through the resurrection in the coming kingdom. Not only that, the Tanakh clearly teaches regarding the atoning death and resurrection of the Messiah, as it says in Isaiah: “…the LORD was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; If He would render Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, and the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand” (Isaiah 53:10) and in the Psalms: “…You will not abandon my soul to Sheol; nor will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay” (Psalm 16:10). The Apostle Paul knew this and said to Timothy: “from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Messiah Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15). The people of faith before the coming of the Messiah were saved by God’s grace based upon the atoning death of the Messiah, just as we are.

Some would argue that the animal sacrifices provided salvation for the people of faith before the coming of the Messiah but such an argument misunderstands the purpose of the animal sacrifices. The animal sacrifices provided atonement in regards to ritual purity not in regards to sins against God in the eternal sense. The writer to the Hebrews said: “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). As the book of Hebrews teaches, the sacrificial service in the Temple in Jerusalem was an earthly reflection of a greater reality. God’s presence resided in the Temple in Jerusalem and only those who were in a state of ritual purity could worship there. Ritual purity was achieved by following the guidelines regarding ritual purity in the Torah and immersing in water under the auspices of the sacrificial blood of animals. The Temple, the priesthood and the animal sacrifices in addition to providing a beautiful worship system for God, taught what the Holy One requires for eternal salvation, namely, the maintaining of the standard set in the Torah (repentance) and immersion in water (baptism) under the auspices of the sacrificial blood of the Messiah. The sacrifice of the Messiah and the animal sacrifices are not in competition! The animal sacrifices are for the purposes of securing ritual purity so that the believer can worship God at the Temple in Jerusalem, whereas the sacrifice of the Messiah is for the purpose of securing eternal salvation so that the believer can be forgiven of their sins and gain immortality in the resurrection. In this way, all believers of all time were saved by the timeless sacrifice of the Messiah; the blood of animals never took away their sin in regards to eternal salvation. The death of the Messiah did not do away with the animal sacrifices because the animal sacrifices would still serve the same purpose today if the Temple were to be rebuilt: they would secure ritual purity, allowing God’s people to worship in God’s holy space, all the while teaching us about the sacrifice of the Messiah, which secures eternal salvation, allowing God’s people to enter into eternity.

If salvation has always been the same, then that would also mean that the work of the Spirit in the lives of God’s people has been the same. To this, some would look at the out-pouring of the Spirit during Shavu’ot in Acts 2 was an indication that believers since then have a greater degree of spirituality than the believers before that point. To this we can simply examine the different ways God’s Spirit works in the lives of individuals to effect salvation and see if the same was true of the believers previous to the coming of the Messiah. Romans 2:29 says that those who are truly saved are circumcised in the heart by the Spirit of God but in Deuteronomy 10:16 the people of Israel are commanded to circumcise their hearts. Circumcision of the heart, that is, a willingness to submit to God, is a work of the Spirit and it is something God expected of the people of Israel previous to the coming of the Messiah. In Romans, the Apostle Paul said: “…the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” (Romans 8:7) and that it is only by the Spirit that we are able to obey God but we know that the people of faith before the coming of the Messiah kept God’s commandments. A simple review of the life of any of the true believers in the Tanakh will show that they were indwelt and led by the Spirit. The out-pouring of the Spirit in Acts 2 was not for salvation but was to energize the Apostolic community to spread the Gospel among the nations and the subsequent and temporary ability to speak in a language they had not learned was simply a sign that God was among them in their mission to the nations (to those of different languages).

Knowing that believers of all generations are saved the same way and we all receive the same work of the Spirit to effect that salvation should dispel the notion that we can disregard the commandments of God because “we’re saved by Jesus not the Law!” Arguments using selected verses from Paul’s epistles should be taken with a grain of salt, since most of the time they are taken out of context. For example, “…sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14) is used to argue that we don’t need to keep the commandments of the Law because we are not saved by the Law anymore, we’re saved by grace but the people before the coming of the Messiah were not saved by keeping the Law, they were saved by grace as we are! Not only that, such a conclusion has missed Paul’s point in Romans 6, namely that through the Messiah we are freed from the condemnation of the Torah, so we should no longer let sin be master over us. Please review the verse-by-verse studies available at MessianicNiagara.com for more!

3) WHAT ARE THE OLD AND NEW COVENANTS?

Another very common argument made by Christians when presented with the idea that we should be keeping the commandments of the Torah is that Christians are under the New Covenant and not the Old Covenant of Law. This argument, however, completely ignores what the Bible teaches regarding the New Covenant and is apparently ignorant of the Bible’s one-time use of the term “old covenant.” Firstly, let’s explore what the Bible teaches regarding the New Covenant. To understand what the New Covenant is, a person must understand that God has made several covenants with the family of Abraham, that is, the people of Israel. God promised Abraham that he would have many descendants and that he and his descendants would possess the land of Israel forever. God then promised the people of Israel that if they were obedient to the commandments of the Torah as a nation that He would keep them in the land and give them innumerable blessings. God also promised Phinehas that his sons would forever serve as the priesthood of Israel. Finally, God promised David that one of his descendants would also be on the throne in Israel. Throughout the history of the nation of Israel, there were only select generations that enjoyed the fulfillment of these promises and even then it wasn’t necessarily in ideal conditions. To this day, God has yet to properly and permanently fulfill any of these covenant promises. There is a future covenant coming, however, a future agreement that God will make with Israel in which He will promise to change His people so that they can receive the blessings promised to them. We read in Jeremiah, in the only passage in the Tanakh that uses the term “new covenant,” and then also in Ezekiel regarding this future covenant:

31″Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 32not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD. 33″But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34″They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” 35Thus says the LORD, Who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar; The LORD of hosts is His name: 36″If this fixed order departs From before Me,” declares the LORD, “Then the offspring of Israel also will cease from being a nation before Me forever.” 37Thus says the LORD, “If the heavens above can be measured And the foundations of the earth searched out below, Then I will also cast off all the offspring of Israel For all that they have done,” declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 31:31-37)

24″For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. 25″Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. 26″Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27″I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. 28″You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:24-28)

Let’s recap the promises made in these passages:

- The Torah written on the hearts of the whole nation of Israel.
- God and Israel will enjoy a unique, intimate relationship.
- Every person among Israel will have intimate relationship with God.
- God will forgive the sins of the entire nation of Israel.
- Israel will forever be God’s covenant people.
- God will gather Israel to the Land.
- God will spiritually cleanse the entire nation of Israel.
- God will give the entire nation of Israel a new heart to live for God.
- God will put His Spirit within the entire nation of Israel.
- The entire nation of Israel will be completely faithful to the covenant of Torah (originally made at Sinai).

Put very simply, the New Covenant is an agreement made between God and Israel that God will spiritually regenerate His people and fulfill all of the promises made to Israel. The New Covenant is a promise to Israel that God will enable His people to keep the Sinai covenant and thus receive the blessings promised: Israel will be in the land forever, they will keep God’s commandments, they will worship Him through the priesthood of the family of Phinehas and the son of David, Yeshua the Messiah, will be king over them.

Knowing what the New Covenant is should bring clarity to the few times the term is used in the Apostolic Scriptures. Yeshua said at that last Passover seder: “….this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). If not for the blood, that is, the death of the Messiah, God would not be able to forgive sins and put into effect that New Covenant in the future. The wine of the Passover seder meal not only symbolizes the deliverance from Egypt but also looks ahead to greater deliverance from sin and death through the resurrection. The Apostle Paul called himself and his associates “servants of a new covenant,” that is, those who were proclaiming the faith and repentance necessary to secure one’s place in that future reality when the New Covenant will be put into effect (see 2 Corinthians 3:6). Finally, the other reference to the New Covenant in the Apostolic Scriptures is in the book of Hebrews and the context is the contrast between this present age and the coming age to come. It says in Hebrews in reference to the New Covenant that “…he has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). The writer to the Hebrews says that the New Covenant is a better covenant and has been enacted on better promises but not because it is a replacement of the Sinai covenant; the New Covenant is a better covenant because the New Covenant promises to enable Israel to keep the Sinai covenant whereas the Sinai covenant in and of itself does not promise to enable Israel to keep the commandments. The covenant made at Sinai presented a choice to the nation ofIsrael: if, as a nation, they obeyed God’s commandments, He would be faithful to all of His covenant promises; if, as a nation, they disobeyed God’s commandments, He would continue to wait to fulfill the promises. Left by themselves,Israel would never be able to keep the commandments as a nation. The solution is to change the hearts of the entire nation, so they can then keep the Sinai covenant receive all of the covenant blessings and this is promised in the New Covenant.
The present reality of the New Covenant was the same for the believers previous to the coming of the Messiah as it is for us. God gives us a portion of His Spirit, an assurance that we will be given immortality and freedom from sin when God fulfills His promises to Israel. In every generation there have been an elect group of believers within Israel and from among the nations who have been given the gift of salvation, a taste of New Covenant life. Believers after the coming of the Messiah are in the same blessed position as believers previous to the coming of the Messiah. In the end, believers from all generations will be resurrected to immortality to live and reign with the Messiah for eternity.

What about the Old Covenant? I submit that there is no “old covenant” in the Bible, at least not in the sense that Christians usually think. Usually, Christians think of the New Covenant as a new Law-free era that started with the coming of the Messiah and the Old Covenant was the previous system of Law that was in place before the coming of the Messiah. As we’ve seen, however, the New Covenant is a yet future agreement that God will make with Israel, promising to spiritually change them so that all previous covenant promises can be fulfilled. So, the previous covenants, including the covenant made at Sinai, are not done away with. Both law and grace existed before the coming of the Messiah and remained the case after his coming. If that’s true, then where do we get the idea that there is an “old covenant”? Firstly, the term itself is found only once in the entire Bible, in 2 Corinthians: “…their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Messiah” (2 Corinthians 3:14). If we had the time, we could study the entirety of chapter 3 of 2 Corinthians so we could see exactly how Paul used this term. First of all, we know from the very next verse that Paul is referring to the five books of Moses, the Torah, when he says “old covenant.” It says in verse 15 of 2 Corinthians: “but to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart” (2 Corinthians 3:15). So, we see that Paul is paralleling the term “old covenant” with “Moses” and Moses is obviously a reference to the Torah. The key to understanding how Paul used the term “old covenant” is looking at how he used the word “old” elsewhere. Paul used the word “old” 5 other times in his epistles and each time it is used to refer a lack of faith or a lack of the work of the Spirit. Here are a couple of examples: “that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit” (Ephesians 4:22) and “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin” (Romans 6:6). The “old self” refers to believers before coming to faith in the Messiah. The “old covenant,” therefore, is Torah read by a member of the covenant of Sinai, a Jewish person, who does not have faith and who has not had God’s Spirit open their eyes to the truth of salvation in Yeshua. To put it another way, especially for Jewish people, if the Torah is espoused but there is no genuine faith, no actual work of the Spirit to regenerate the heart, there can never be assurance of the New Covenant promises. For that person, the Torah will remain as the “old” covenant for them; the Sinai covenant without the New Covenant promises, that is, the ability to actually keep Torah and be faithful. Unless there is genuine faith and repentance, a result of the Spirit’s work, a veil will remain over the Torah, which in turns veils the heart; there will always be a barricade between the glory of the Torah and the heart of the person.

Yes, the Torah can be veiled and even the Gospel can be veiled, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4, but the key is that these things are veiled to those who are perishing because Satan and their sin has blinded them, preventing them from seeing the true way of salvation. If we were to call the Gospel the “old gospel,” that would refer to the fact that the hearer of the Gospel was spiritually deaf and blind and could not espouse God’s salvation by faith. In either case, when one turns to LORD in faith, it is neither the Torah nor the Gospel that is taken away; it is the veil that lies over their heart that is taken away. For believers, the covenant of Sinai, and the Torah which is a part of that covenant, is not “old” and this is because we are spiritually united with the Messiah, who has removed the veil and gives us the ability to be obedient. The Torah is not a source of condemnation for believers because we have assurance of the New Covenant promises. If we embrace the way Paul used the terms “old” and “new,” it is not correct for believers to call any part of the Scripture “old” because, to us, it is all “new.” The so-called Old Covenant refers to being a part of the covenant at Sinai without the work of the Spirit. To Paul, this was what the false teachers of his day were unwittingly proclaiming by teaching that salvation could be secured through legal conversion to Judaism: participation in Israel and connection to the Torah without the work of the Spirit. To put it another way, if one seeks out ritual conversion as their ticket into Israel, that person is participating in the covenant of Sinai without the promises of the New Covenant and therefore, because the Spirit has not applied the blood of Messiah and regenerated the heart, they are guaranteed the condemnation that comes from breaking the Torah.

4) IDENTITY ISSUES: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND ISRAEL?

Another angle that many Christians take in arguing that believers do not need to keep particular aspects of the Torah, such as the Sabbath and kosher laws, is that Christians make up the Church and the Law was for Israel. This argument is deeply connected to the previous arguments made because the reasoning is that the Church has grace and is a part of the New Covenant, whereas Israel had the Law and is a part of the Old Covenant. We’ve already seen that salvation by grace has always been the way God has saved His people and that the New Covenant is a yet future agreement between God and Israel, so how should we understand ourselves within the scope of God’s people? What is the Church and how does it relate to the people of Israel?

I think all Christians can agree that God’s people from the time of Abraham to the Messiah were the people of Israel. Israel was the only nation on earth that was in covenant relationship with God. Sure, select Gentiles would join the people of Israel but it was primarily the people of Israel that knew and obeyed the one true God. Did this change at any point? Since the ascension of the Messiah and the out-pouring of the Spirit in Acts 2, most Christians would understand that God no longer considers the people of Israel to be His primary concern; instead, a new group, made up of both Jews and Gentiles, the Church, is God’s primary concern. We’re told that the Church is different from Israel: we’re under grace, not law; we’re under the New Covenant not the Old Covenant; we keep Sunday not the Sabbath; we baptize not circumcise; we meet in churches not synagogues; and on and on. But is this how the Apostles viewed the Assembly of the Messiah. As most of us know, the Greek word “ecclesia” is usually translated in our English Bibles as “church” but this is not accurate since the word “ecclesia” simply means “assembly” or “congregation.” So, is the Messiah’s Assembly distinct from the people of Israel or is perhaps the Assembly more closely connected to God’s covenant people Israel?

There is one primary problem with thinking that the Assembly is a completely separate entity from the people of Israel: apart from the covenant made with Noah (and all humanity), the Bible nowhere teaches that God has made any covenants with anyone but the people of Israel, including the New Covenant, the covenant that promises eternal salvation. If you are not a part of the people of Israel, you cannot have covenant relationship with God apart from the basic promises given to Noah. The Apostle Paul put it this way in reference to the state Gentile believers were in previous to coming to faith: “…you were at that time separate from Messiah, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). How often do we hear calls to salvation that include acceptance of God and the Messiah, so that we can achieve hope, but included with God and the Messiah is being included in the commonwealth of Israel and not being strangers to the covenants of the promise! In other words, essential to salvation is being united with the Messiah but we must also understand ourselves to be now a part of the commonwealth of Israel and no longer be strangers to the covenants of the promise. The word translated here as “commonwealth” is the Greek word “politeia,” which can be translated as “citizenship.” In this way, we see that it is not that God has started a new group distinct from Israel; God has instead, in addition to giving covenant promises to the people of Israel, has also given Israelite citizenship, so to speak, to Gentiles, so that we too can enjoy the covenant promises made to Israel. (Citizenship, likely in the same sense that Paul had Roman citizenship but was still Jewish. Gentiles do not become Israelites or Jewish but we do have citizenship, that is, rights and privileges, in Israel.) Paul said in the next verse: “but now in Messiah Yeshua you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Messiah” (Ephesians 2:13). Gentile believers are not excluded from the covenant promises made to Israel because we are united with the quintessential Israelite, Yeshua the Messiah.

The people of Israel are God’s covenant people and every Jewish person, regardless of their relationship with God, participates in the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai (they are either in obedience or disobedience). In every generation, however, God bestows upon a faithful remnant in Israel His Holy Spirit as a sort of down-payment or foretaste, guaranteeing that each faithful remnant will be resurrected in the end to enjoy the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. The faithful remnant in each generation are those who turn to God in faith and repentance, trusting that God will send the Messiah or for those since the Messiah’s coming, those who trust that God has sent the Messiah to deal with sin and will send him again to reign as king. You could call each faithful remnant the Messiah’s assembly (or church). The Messiah’s assembly cannot be considered an entity distinct from Israel because it is made up of faithful Israelites. Gentile believers too are not distinct from Israel because even though we are not Jewish, we are united with believing Jews in the Messiah’s Assembly. So, the Messiah’s Assembly is not a new entity that replaces Israel but is instead made up of faithful Israelites and those selected from the nations; together we constitute those who are witnesses for the Messiah. For more, please review our study notes on Romans 9-11 at MessianicNiagara.com.

So, to say “we don’t keep the Law because we’re the Church not Israel!” is to miss that the Church is made up of faithful Israelites and they are certainly supposed to be keeping the Law. There is nothing in the entire Bible that would indicate that Jewish people are supposed to stop keeping the commandments of the Torah when they become believers. On the contrary, as the faithful remnant, Jewish followers of the Messiah should be the most obedient and Torah-observant people in the world. The question is rather, do Gentile believers have to keep the commandments of the Torah? Most of the time, the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 and the entire epistle to the Galatians is raised as proof that Gentile believers do not have to keep the Torah but was the issue with Gentile believers keeping the Torah or was it something else, albeit connected with elements of the Torah?

As we’ve already covered, it’s usually assumed by Christians that people previous to the coming of the Messiah were saved by keeping the Law, so when they read and interpret Acts 15 and Galatians, it’s usually assumed that there were holdouts in the Apostolic community that were teaching that the new Gentile believers had to keep the Law in order to merit salvation. These assumptions, however, totally miss the fact that nowhere does anyone state that salvation can be obtained through keeping the Law. Instead, we read in Acts 15: “Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’” (Acts 15:1). The main issue was that some among the Apostolic community believed that Gentiles could not be saved unless they were circumcised. Why would these men think that if you weren’t circumcised that you wouldn’t be saved? Did they really think that the simple cutting of the flesh would grant you salvation? Also, look how the word “saved” is used. They didn’t care what you believed or confessed but rather that you were “circumcised.” To these men, circumcision made the difference. If you were circumcised, then you were “in.” If you were not circumcised, then you were not “in.” What did the term “circumcision” mean in the first century? We read throughout Acts and the Epistles that the term “circumcision” refers to those who are legally Jewish, that is, those who according to Jewish law are identified as Jewish. Of course, this legal Jewish status could be obtained by being born Jewish but it could also be obtained through ritual conversion and the primary element of ritual conversion, for men at least, was circumcision.

The basic premise behind this line of thinking is not wrong! Indeed, Israel is the only nation that God has made covenant promises to. The question is how Gentiles can participate and receive these covenant promises as well. The prevailing idea among the Jewish communities of the first century was that they had to be come legally Jewish through ritual conversion. The truth is that God accepts Gentiles through faith in the Messiah. In Galatians 2, Paul recounts a time when he, Barnabas and Titus went to Jerusalem to meet with some of the other leaders in the Apostolic community. He presented to them the Gospel he was proclaiming to the Gentiles, to see if they approved of it. Their response was that Titus, a Greek, did not have to be circumcised. With our knowledge of how the Jewish community believed Gentiles could be saved, what does the Jerusalem leadership’s response to Titus mean? It means they agreed with Paul’s Gospel that through the Messiah, Gentiles could be saved as Gentiles, without having to become legally Jewish (become proselytes). Paul’s message that Gentile believers did not have to become legally Jewish in order to be saved was solidified in the Jerusalem council’s decision. The Apostle Peter recounted the fact that God had first worked through him to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles and that the Spirit was poured out on the Gentiles just as it was on the Jewish people in Acts 2. With that in mind, Peter said: “…we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Master Yeshua, in the same way as they also are” (Acts 15:11). Finally, the leader of the Jerusalem assembly, Ya’akov, declared that “it is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles but that we write to them that they abstain from things contaminated by idols and from fornication and from what is strangled and from blood” (Acts 15:19-20). So, in the end, the unified Apostolic decision on Gentile believers is that we do not have to be legally Jewish to be considered a part of the family of Abraham. Instead, Paul went on to say: “be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham” (Galatians 3:7) with the phrase “son of Abraham” actually being a short-hand way of referring to those Gentiles who had become proselytes. Reading Paul’s epistle to Galatians knowing that these Gentile believers were being influenced to become converts to Judaism in order to complete their salvation sheds light on what Paul was prohibiting when he fiercely stated: “Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Messiah will be of no benefit to you” (Galatians 5:2). It was not that Paul was teaching them to not keep the commandments of the Torah, even getting circumcised in and of itself, instead he was teaching them that if they thought there was more to do, namely, becoming proselytes (getting circumcised), in order to complete their salvation, then the Messiah’s death for them would be made useless because they wouldn’t be trusting that Messiah’s death was enough to secure their salvation. No, faith in the death of the Messiah is sufficient for Gentile believers to be accepted by God. For more, please review our study on the epistle to the Galatians at MessianicNiagara.com.

5) GENTILE OBLIGATION TO THE TORAH

If Gentile believers do not need to become legally Jewish in order to be counted among God’s covenant people, do we have any obligation to the commandments of the Torah? Of course we do! Our obligation to the Torah centers on our devotion to the Messiah Yeshua. Jewish people are naturally obligated to the commandments of the Torah because God has made a covenant with the nation of Israel, promising to bless them when they keep the commandments. Gentiles, however, are not obligated to keep God’s commandments. However, when Gentiles become believers, they take on a life of imitation of the perfectly Torah-observant Messiah of Israel. Yeshua said in Luke: “A pupil is not above his teacher; but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40) and, as mentioned earlier, John said: “…the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked” (1 John 2:6). Yeshua himself said: “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17), which refers to the fact that his teachings do not in any way cause his disciples to break the commandments of the Torah. Instead, by following the teachings and example of Yeshua, we will be keeping the commandments of the Torah.

The commandments of the Torah reveal to us God’s wisdom; without the commandments of God, we would not know what is right or wrong. It says in Romans: “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET’” (Romans 7:7) and the Apostle John said: “Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). The commandments are God’s gift to His people, so that we can live out the salvation that He has given us by His grace.

Yeshua went on to teach in Matthew: “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:18-19). Later on in Matthew, regarding the disciples that the Apostles would make among the Gentiles, Yeshua instructed the Apostles to “[teach] them to observe all that I commanded you…” (Matthew 28:20).

As Gentile followers of Yeshua the Messiah we have an opportunity to show our solidarity with God’s people Israel and to show the world the life that flows from having faith in the one true God. As the Apostle Paul said: “Do we then nullify the Torah through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Torah” (Romans 3:31). Are Gentile believers absolutely obligated to the commandments of the Torah such as the Sabbath, festivals, kosher laws and more? No, not for salvation and not as a matter of natural obligation to the covenant of Sinai. But should Gentile believers imitate the Messiah and live out the commandments given to Israel as result of our new identity in the Messiah? Of course! This means that we as Gentile believers can and should keep the Sabbath, celebrate the holidays, keep kosher, wear tzitzit and tefillin and all of the other commandments given to the people of Israel. So, it’s not a matter of, on the one hand, must, as if we’d lose our salvation, nor is it, on the other hand, a matter of could, as if we can declare faith in the Messiah and then live however we want. Instead, it’s a matter of should, it’s a matter of keeping these commandments because it’s the right thing to do as followers of Yeshua the Messiah because he kept these commandments.

CONCLUSIONS

The main aspect of dispensational theology we sought to refute is that God relates to His people differently since the coming of the Messiah than He did before the coming of the Messiah. Firstly, Jesus and the Apostles were Torah observant Jews and there is no evidence in the Apostolic Scriptures that they started or wanted a new religion to be started in distinction from the life of faith given to Israel. So, the things Jesus and the Apostles taught and the way they lived do not indicate there is a new way of life different from the life of faith previous to the coming of the Messiah. Secondly, there has only been one way of being saved and that’s by God’s grace through faith based on the death and resurrection of the Messiah. So, any argument that tries to insinuate that there’s a new way of salvation by grace as opposed to an old way of salvation through the Law should be rejected. Thirdly, the work of the Spirit in believers in regards to salvation has always been the same. So, any argument that says that believers since the coming of the Messiah have a more spiritual relationship to God than those before his coming should simply look at the men of faith in the Tanakh and determine if we are any better. Fourthly, the New Covenant is a yet future agreement God will make with Israel wherein He will spiritually change them so they can become faithful to the Torah. Israel’s faithfulness will trigger the fulfillment of all of God’s covenant promises. So, any notion that the coming of the Messiah started some law-free New Covenant era simply ignores what the Bible teaches about the New Covenant. Fifthly, there is no actual “old covenant” instead it’s a term that Paul coined to describe the Torah as read by an unbelieving Jewish person. So, to say that the Old Covenant was the time before the coming of the Messiah is to ignore how Paul used the term, the one time it is used in the Bible. Sixthly, the Church is not a distinct entity from Israel since the Church or the Messiah’s Assembly is made up of faithful Israelites and believing Gentiles. So, any excuse that we don’t have to keep certain commandments because we’re in the Church and not Israel is to miss that the Messiah’s Assembly is made up of faithful Israelites and Gentiles grafted into the metaphorical tree of Israel. Seventhly, Gentile believers must be associated with Israel in order to enjoy the covenant promises made by God. We are associated with Israel in our union with the Messiah. Eighthly, the commonly assumed issue facing the Apostles in the first century is that there were those that wanted Gentiles to keep the Law but the real issue is that they wanted the Gentiles to convert to Judaism, to become legally Jewish. The Apostles clarified that Gentiles need not convert to Judaism in order to be saved. So, any argument that uses Acts 15 or Galatians to prove that Gentile believers don’t need to keep the Law is using those texts of context since those refer to legal conversion not simple keeping of God’s commandments as a matter of discipleship. Lastly, Gentiles do not to become Jewish when they become believers but instead are now Gentile disciples of the Messiah. In this way, imitation of the Messiah will lead to Torah observance. Knowing all of this, is there any reason to continue to call the books prior to Matthew the “Old Testament” and the writings of the Apostles the “New Testament”? Do not these labels simply feed these false dispensational notions?

Reasons Why The Bible Presents Unitarianism Not Trinitarianism

The Trinitarian view: 

The Modalist view: 

The Unitarian view:

5) God possesses certain attributes which are incompatible with human nature.
“now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17)

“[God] alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see: to Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen” (1 Timothy 6:16)

“let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone” (James 1:13, cf. Luke 22:42)

“but of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matthew 24:36, cf. 1 John 3:20)

Recovering True Monotheism
Reasons Why the Bible Presents Unitarianism Not Trinitarianism

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As Christians, the questions “who is God?” and “who is Jesus?” are of the utmost importance. The following is a short survey of the Bible to begin to answer those questions. Primarily of importance, we are looking to determine how many persons God is and if Jesus is himself God. To start, let’s define the historical positions on the nature of God and the relationship between the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit:

The Trinitarian view: God is three persons (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit), each person being fully God, co-eternal, co-essential, and co-equal. In this way, God is not an individual person, but rather three individual persons who each share the substance of “God.” It can be said this way: “God is three whos in one what.” Jesus is God the Son incarnate, making him both fully God the Son and fully human.

The Modalist view: God is one person who manifests Himself in three ways or modes (as Father, Son or Holy Spirit). This can be expressed this way: “God is one who in three whats.” Jesus is God incarnate.

The Unitarian view: God is a single person, the Father, whereas Jesus is God’s direct creation in the womb of Mary, the second Adam, and the Holy Spirit is God’s personal, operational presence in His creation. Jesus is the fully human son of God who functions as God to his people but is not literally God in any sense.

It is almost impossible to approach the Bible without already having one of these perspectives already in mind. The purpose of this short survey is to demonstrate that the Bible actually presents the Unitarian view and that the other views were developed to deal with the Christological passages that seem to imply that Jesus is literally God.

1. God is always presented as singular person.

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God gave us His revelation in common language, which means that we must take the language used as normative. In other words, if God intended to communicate truth to us, He would have had to have done it using a method we can understand. For God to use words that normally mean one thing to us but He actually meant something different, then it is no longer revelation, it is confusion. So, when God consistently uses the first person, singular personal pronoun when referring to Himself, we must take that to mean that He is one person. In normal language, when the words “I,” “me,” “he,” “him,” and “himself” are used, they all refer to one person. The handful of times that the plural personal pronoun is used in reference to God (Genesis 1:26, 3:22, 11:7 and Isaiah 6:8) must be weighed against the thousands of verses that use the singular personal pronoun instead. Besides, when a person uses the first person, plural pronoun, it always refers to one person and at least one other person. Why would we think that isn’t what God meant in those rare instances where He uses a plural pronoun? Why would we suddenly think that it refers to multiple persons within an entity?

As mentioned, there are literally thousands of examples we could look at to find the singular personal pronoun used of God but the following should suffice:

Know therefore today, and take it to your heart, that the LORD, He is God in heaven above and on the earth below; there is no other. (Deuteronomy 4:39)

Here we find Moses referring to God as “He,” meaning God is a single person. The purpose of this verse is to convey that HaShem is the only God in the universe. This, of course, is another of way stating the cardinal creed of Israel: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4). If God was a Trinity of persons, this verse should read “…the LORD, they are God…” but it does not, it communicates to us that God is one person.

See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me; it is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, and there is no one who can deliver from My hand. (Deuteronomy 32:39)

Here we have God speaking in the first person and referring to Himself as “I.” Here God exhausts human language to communicate that He is a single individual and that He alone is God. I submit that the entire concept of multiple persons within the same god is completely foreign to the Bible, whether of the true God or even of false gods. False gods are individual persons as well and here in this verse HaShem declared that those so-called gods do not actual exist for He alone is the only true God.

‘You are My witnesses,’ declares the LORD, ‘and My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He, before Me there was no God formed, and there will be none after Me. I, even I, am the LORD, and there is no savior besides Me’ (Isaiah 43:10-11).

“Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God besides Me” (Isaiah 44:6).
Here we find HaShem revealing again that He alone is God and that there are no other gods. The words “I” and “Me” are used to signify that HaShem is a singular personal entity. There is no hint that HaShem is actually three persons. If God is actually three persons then plural pronouns should have been used since it would be deceitful to use singular personal pronouns to refer to the impersonal essence or substance that the three persons of the Trinity share.

2. Jesus is always presented as a person distinct from the one God.

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The Bible clearly presents Jesus as a distinct person from His Father. Even Trinitarians readily admit this, since, from that perspective, the unity between the Father and Jesus is not in that they are the same person but that they share the same essence or substance. In this way, when the Bible distinguishes between Jesus and God the Father, the Trinitarians can affirm this and maintain the doctrine of the Trinity. However, there are instances when Jesus is distinguished from God and the word “God” is not coupled with a further identification (i.e. God the Father). To put it a different way, from a Trinitarian perspective, when the word “god” is used of the one true deity, it can refer to the three persons of the Trinity at once or it can refer to a specific person of that Trinity. So, when the word “God” without any reference to a specific person of the Trinity is used and it is distinguished from Jesus, the Trinitarian has to infer that the Father is meant (or perhaps the Spirit). In this way, the Trinitarian gets to have their cake and eat it too. Conveniently for them, the writers of Scripture can make a distinction between God and Jesus and yet Jesus can still be God because the doctrine of the Trinity does acknowledge the distinction in persons. This, however, is placing a contrived doctrine onto the text of Scripture. What if the writers of Scripture, when distinguishing Jesus from God, were simply saying that Jesus is not to be understood as God?
 

Take, for example, this creedal statement in 1 Timothy: “for there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Messiah Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Unless Paul intended to communicate that Jesus is a mediator between man and himself, the reference to the one God here is a reference to the Father. So, unless Paul intended to convey that Jesus is the mediator between man and one person of the Trinity (the Father, who would then somehow be the “one God”), Jesus here, whom Paul clearly identified as a man, is the mediator between God the Father, the one God, and men. With only a handful of exceptions, the thirteen hundred plus times the word “God” (“theos“) is used in the Apostolic Scriptures, it undeniably refers to the Father. This is because the Father is the only true God, as Jesus himself declared in John: “this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus the Messiah whom You have sent” (John 17:3). In prayer to the Father, Jesus declared that the Father is the only true God. Of course, eternal life is that we have relationship with the Father through Jesus the Messiah, whom the one God has sent. It is true and let us affirm that the only way to God is through the Messiah Jesus but Jesus is not to be confused with the one God.

Consider Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians: “therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him” (1 Corinthians 8:4-6). Here the Father is clearly identified as the one God and once again Jesus the Messiah, our one human Lord, is coupled with his Father. This passage distinguishes between God and Jesus but, of course, recognizes the highly exalted position that Jesus enjoys. This is similar to Psalm 110:1, the most quoted or alluded to passage of the Tanakh in the Apostolic Scriptures.

The first verse of the hundred and tenth Psalm says: “the LORD says to my Lord: ‘sit at My right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’” (Psalm 110:1). Here, David prophetically records for us a statement from HaShem to David’s Lord. Our English translations blur the distinction made between the first “LORD” and the second “Lord” in this verse. The first “LORD,” in the Hebrew, is actually the Tetragrammaton, that is, the four-letter name of God. The second “Lord” in this verse is actually the Hebrew word “adoni,” which literally means “my lord.” The word “adoni” is never used of God in the Bible but certainly does refer to human superiors. So, like what we saw in John 17:3 and 1 Corinthians 8:6, Jesus is clearly distinguished from the one God, HaShem, but is also coupled with Him.

Again, it is true that Jesus has been highly exalted but his exalted position was granted to him by God and it is for God’s glory. Paul said in Philippians: “…God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus the Messiah is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11). Notice how it is the Father who is identified as God, whereas Jesus is identified as Lord, which is the pattern set by Psalm 110:1. Elsewhere, in Acts, we learn that God highly exalted Jesus and made him both Lord and Messiah: “…let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Messiah–this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). Read through the entire book of Acts (and the rest of the Bible) and you will consistently find the Apostles distinguishing Jesus from God, who is clearly
the Father.

(Not only that, even among Trinitarians, most Christians already relate to God and Jesus through the Unitarian model. Do you believe that Jesus is God’s son and God’s anointed King? Then you are making a distinction between the one God and His human son, Jesus.)

3. Any text that appears to equate Jesus with God has a literary parallel, which proves that it is not to be taken literally.

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In the Apostolic Scriptures, we encounter several passages that on the surface appear to imply that Jesus is literally God. To conclude that, in these passages, the Apostles intended to convey to us that Jesus is literally God is take their words hyper-literally. In other words, when we read and interpret the Bible, we must remember that though we are to take the Bible literally, sometimes the writers of Scripture employ metaphor and symbolism. Additionally, sometimes the Apostles use certain language which the Jewish audience of the day would have understood to be taken poetically and not literally. For example, in Colossians, Paul said: “…by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). Similarly, it says in Hebrews: “in these last days [God] has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world” (Hebrews 1:2). Taken out of context and without any knowledge of the Jewish literature of the day, we could conclude that Jesus was the Creator of the universe. However, Paul and the writer to the Hebrews were both using the language that other Jewish writers of the day used of wisdom. For example, Philo said that Wisdom was the agent that God used to create the world (see Christology in the Making, James Dunn, pg.  ). Not only that, but in the Hebrew Scriptures we find: “the LORD by wisdom founded the earth, by understanding He established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19).

So, what did the Apostles intend to convey by equating Jesus with the wisdom of God? Jesus is the wisdom of God in so far that he fully obeyed God and therefore perfectly lived out the wisdom of God found in the commandments. As a human being, Jesus perfectly conveyed to us the right way to live since he always used God’s wisdom. In what way was the universe created through Jesus? Jesus is the creative power of God because God had Jesus in mind when creating the world, specifically in regards to us and our salvation. Additionally, through Jesus we are created anew, destined to live forever. These statements are beautifully poetic and express to us how perfect and Godly Jesus was and is.

In the first chapter of the gospel of John we find: “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:1-3). John clearly echoes the first line from the book of Genesis when he says “in the beginning.” In fact, the Hebrew name for the book of Genesis is Breisheet which we translate as “in the beginning.” Therefore, with just the first line, John intends for us to think of the Torah. This informs what John meant when he used the word “logos,” which is translated into English as “word.” In Jewish thinking, the Torah is God’s own expression of Himself to Israel (and the world), His very word. In the Torah we can learn about who God is and what He expects of mankind. Through God’s commandments, mankind can know God’s wisdom. This wisdom, the expression of God, was poetically personified in the book of Proverbs: “when He established the heavens, I was there, when He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep” (Proverbs 8:27, cf. all of chapter 8 of Proverbs). No one in ancient Israel took the personification of wisdom in the book of Proverbs literally, as if there was a lady named Wisdom there with God at creation. Instead, personifying God’s attributes is way of expressing the transcendent God. The personification of the word here in the first chapter of John should be understood in a similar vein.

To speak of God’s word being with God and being God is just another way to communicate how God expresses Himself and that this expression accurately represents Him. Just as the words we speak express our thoughts and represent who we are, so too does God’s word (His speech) express who He is and represents Him perfectly. We should keep in mind however, that a person’s speech is not literally the person but rather represents the person. This, of course, is highly philosophical and esoteric but this is how John chose to present his version of the story of Jesus.

If we are correct in thinking that the word that John has in mind is God’s speech which brought creation into existence as conveyed to us in the Torah then we can be sure that any personification of the word is purely for poetical reasons. In Genesis, God’s word is not to be understood as a second person but rather the expression of God. John would not be the first Biblical writer to attribute personality to God’s word. Isaiah recorded the words of God as follows: “as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:10-11). Here, God’s word is sent on a mission and accomplishes the task assigned to it but God’s word should not be understood to be a literal person.

When we come to verse 14 of the first chapter of John, we find: “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). It is at this point that we can rightly speak of the word being a literal person, in the sense that God’s word was embodied in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth. It is correct to say that Jesus is the word of God made flesh because he is the direct creation of God who perfectly expresses God to the world in regards to being a man. This informs what is written later in the first chapter of John: “no one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (John 1:18). Whether the text says “the only begotten God” or “the only begotten Son” (the manuscripts differ on this) is irrelevant because what is being communicated is that Jesus is the ultimate created representative of the one God. Jesus is the new Adam, the image of the invisible God, which means he represents God. In fact, Jesus represents God so perfectly that he could say: “…he who has seen me has seen the Father…” (John 14:9).

4. Scripture never requires belief in Jesus as God but rather we are to affirm that Jesus is Lord, Messiah, Son of God and Saviour, all things that do not necessarily make him God.

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There is never a place where the Bible calls for belief that Jesus is God. When Jesus asks Peter who he thought he was, Peter’s reply was to declare that Jesus was “…the Messiah, the son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16); Jesus’ approval of Peter’s declaration should signal to us that there wasn’t more to be learned about Jesus’ nature. Similarly, at the end of the book of John we read: “these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31). Consider also Paul’s words in Romans: “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Search through the Scriptures and you will never find anything that requires people to believe that Jesus is literally God.

Surely, we must affirm that Jesus is our Lord (cf. Psalm 110:1), God’s anointed, the one who was directly created in the womb of Mary, making him God’s only begotten son (cf. Luke 1:35). To confess Jesus as Lord is to confess that he is your God-appointed human superior. Jesus is the one we must pledge allegiance to and imitate because he is God’s chosen and perfect representative. Jesus is the son of God because he was begotten in the womb of a virgin. To say that Jesus is God is to make nonsense the words “son of” in the title “son of God.”

Additionally, similar to the instance in Matthew 16, in Mark 12 we find another opportunity for Jesus to teach that he is to be included in the definition of the nature of God and that there was more to God than simply understanding Him to be one person. In affirming Jesus’ statement that the Shema was the greatest of all the commandments, the scribe said: “right, Teacher; you have truly stated that HE IS ONE, AND THERE IS NO ONE ELSE BESIDES HIM” (Mark 12:32). Again, notice the use of singular personal pronouns in reference to the one God. Not only did Jesus not go on to say that there was more to learned about the nature of God, he complimented the scribe, saying that he was not far from the kingdom.

5. God possess certain attributes which are incompatible with human nature, namely, God possesses intrinsic immortality, whereas Jesus died.

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The last thing we can look at in this short study is the issue of how God can become a man. The classical Trinitarian position is that Jesus was both fully man and fully God. From this view, though Jesus has two natures, he is still one person. On this surface, this view appears to satisfy the conundrum that the Scriptures seem to speak of Jesus both in terms of being a man and being God. Digging a little deeper, however, we find that there are certain characteristics of God and man that are simply incompatible. Foremost is that of that fact that God is intrinsically immortal, whereas man is mortal.

In Paul’s first epistle to Timothy, it says: “now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17). Here, Paul clearly identifies the only God as being immortal and invisible. Not only that, he went on to say in that same epistle that God “alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see: to Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen” (1 Timothy 6:16). It does not take much convincing of any thinking Christian that Jesus was mortal and visible!

From the so-called orthodox Christian perspective, Jesus was both fully God and fully man but yet was still one person (Jesus did not have two centers of consciousness). If this was the case, then how is it possible to say that the God part of him lived on but the human part of him died? Does that have any meaning? Death is the cessation of life, the cessation of consciousness. Doesn’t it make more sense that Jesus was a man and that when he died, he actually died?

God cannot be tempted, as it says in James: “let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone” (James 1:13), but Jesus was tempted. If Jesus is God then the temptation that he endured from Satan was a charade. Not only that, if Jesus cannot actually be tempted to sin, it diminishes his decision to give himself as a ransom for his people. Thankfully, despite the temptation to do otherwise, Jesus said to God: “yet not my will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

God knows everything (1 John 3:20) but Jesus didn’t know the time of his return, as it says in Matthew: “but of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matthew 24:36). Are there secrets within the Godhead? Is Jesus able to limit the God part of himself?

I submit that, despite paying lip service to it, no one actually believes in the doctrine that states Jesus is both fully God and fully man. Taking what’s written about Jesus in the Gospels, you will either understand him to be God functioning as man or man functioning as God. Trinitarians have to explain away the parts of the Gospels that clearly show Jesus to be a man. When Jesus does not know the time of his second coming, at this moment, from the Trinitarian perspective, Jesus is simply functioning as man and the God part of him is somehow being limited. When Jesus died, the human part of Jesus died but the God part continued to live. So, is Jesus’ consciousness in the human part or the God part? If it’s in the God part, then why did he not know the time of his second coming? If it’s in the human part, then how can we say that the God part continued to live on when his human part died? The doctrine that Jesus is both fully God and fully man simply does not hold up under scrutiny. Instead, Jesus is fully human and, as a perfect human being, he represents God to us; Jesus functions as God to us but is not literally God.

As more and more Christians come to see the beauty and validity of the commandments of the Torah (such as the Sabbath and the kosher laws), many well-meaning and concerned brothers and sisters point us to the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. Their intention is to remind us that in that epistle, the Apostle Paul taught against Gentile Believers keeping the Law.

But does the epistle to the Galatians really teach against Gentile Believers keeping the Torah? Is the Apostle Paul able to overthrow the clear words of both the Hebrew Scriptures and of the Messiah Himself, which instructs us to obey the Torah, and lead Gentiles away from God’s commandments? From a historical Christian perspective, the answers to both of these questions are a resounding “yes!” The long-standing interpretation of Galatians is that Paul was teaching against Gentile Believers keeping the Torah.

Is this interpretation, however, consistent with the rest of the Bible and even the Apostle Paul’s own writings? Now, I’m not claiming to have THE interpretation of Galatians, nor am I claiming to be able to properly interpret every single verse, though I have attempted to do so and you can read my thoughts on MessianicNiagara.com in the Studies section. This blog entry is a summation of the introduction to those notes.

So, the objection we are going to seek to answer is:

Christians shouldn’t keep the Torah because, in Galatians, Paul taught us not to.

The first thing we need to do to properly interpret this epistle is determine the historical context. Not only that, we need to review how the Bible presents the Apostle Paul and let that perspective be consistent with our interpretation of Galatians.

Though it’s my opinion that Galatians was written before the events of Acts 15, I believe that Acts 15 was dealing with the exact same issue that Paul was in Galatians. The issue at hand in Acts 15 was given to us in the first verse:

Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”

Here we see that some men from Judea came down to Antioch and began teaching the Gentile Believers that unless they were circumcised they could not be saved. Now, words only have meaning within their historical and cultural context. That is, unless you are aware of how a person is using their words, you might not know what they are referring to. In this case, in their first century, Jewish context what did the words “circumcised,” “custom of Moses” and “saved” refer to? To understand these words, we should quickly summarize what at least some in the Jewish communities believed in regards to salvation.

For centuries, Christian commentators assumed that the Jewish communities of the first century believed that salvation was based upon obedience to the Torah but one is hard pressed to come up with this by reading any Jewish literature of the first century. The Apostolic Scriptures (NT), the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmud (which contains theology that was no doubt espoused in the first century) give us no clear indication that there was a unified idea on how one could be assured of eternal life. Instead, much of the ideology that was developed regarding salvation instead started with the premise that God had graciously chosen Israel to be His covenant nation. Therefore, it was assumed that those who were a part of Israel would be saved. This line of thinking is actually correct! What do I mean by that?

I mean that if one honestly assesses the Scriptures, you will notice that God has only made covenant promises to the nation Israel. Even the New Covenant, which promises the forgiveness of sins, is made with the House of Judah and Israel (cf. Jeremiah 31:31-34). There is no people group outside of Israel that has any assurance of salvation. The question, would then be, who makes up the covenant people of Israel?

No doubt each group within the Jewish communities of the first century had their own ideas on who constituted the people of Israel and therefore those who would be assured of a place in the World to Come. The Essenes, that is the Dead Sea Scroll community, had one set of criteria that one would have to meet in order to be counted among the saved. Among the Pharisees, there were probably differing theories. The Saducees, well, they didn’t even believe in the World to Come, so to them it was irrelevant.

Nevertheless, there is one aspect that probably all of the different sects agreed upon: Gentiles, that is, those who were not ethnically a part of Israel, were excluded from God’s covenants and therefore had no assurance of salvation. This sentiment is represented in Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:12. Speaking to the Gentile Believers, Paul says:

Remember that you were at that time separate from Messiah, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

To the modern Christian mindset, what does being excluded from the commonwealth of Israel and being strangers to the covenants of promise have to do with our salvation? Probably nothing. But in the first century Jewish context, if one was not a part of Israel or a participant in the covenants God made with Israel, you were not saved.

So, going back to Acts 15:1, we can begin to understand what the men from Judea were referring to when they said: “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” I would like to note that I just said “begin to understand” because even though we now understand that the general idea in the first century was that salvation was based upon being a part of Israel, that still doesn’t explain what circumcision had to do with it. To answer, we’ll have to answer these questions: what was the criteria one had to meet in order to be counted among the people of Israel? And what did the word “circumcision” refer to?

To put it simply, if you were born ethnically Jewish, you had an automatic ticket to eternal life. Now, this does not mean that there weren’t many opinions as to what the Jewish person had to do to maintain this status but, generally speaking, as long as the Jewish person did not break the Sabbath and other commandments that carried the death penalty, they could be assured that they were a part of God’s covenant people and had a place in the World to Come.

What about a Gentile though? How could a Gentile become a part of the covenant people? Interestingly, the Torah itself gives no indication that a Gentile would have to “do” anything. The Torah assumes that there are “strangers” (that is, people who aren’t physically Israel) among God’s people who would have a desire to worship God. This is why you’ll see time after time that when God commands the people of Israel to do something there is also the mention of the stranger. For example, the Sabbath commandment; the Sabbath is to be kept by not only native born Israelites but also the sojourner. As it says:

But the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. (Exodus 20:10)

In the days of the Torah, the sojourner (or stranger or alien, depending on your Bible translation) was simply a non-Israelite who lived among the people of Israel, had a desire to worship the one true God and did so by the standards given by God to His people Israel. In Paul’s day, however, the status of the stranger became a little more convoluted. It would appear that in the first century there were two classes of Gentiles within the synagogue communities: the proselyte, that is, a Gentile who had formally converted to Judaism and the God-fearer, that is, a Gentile who worshipped in synagogue context but had no formally converted to Judaism. The conversion process was made up of three particular elements:

 Circumcision (for males)
 Ritual immersion (baptism)
 If possible, making a sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem

Upon completion, the Gentile would be granted legal status as a Jew and would thus be reckoned a legitimate part of Israel. The new convert would receive all the privileges of the native-born and also be legally liable for breaking any of the commandments of the Torah. The God-fearer, on the other hand, was kind of in no-man’s land, for while they weren’t considered outright pagans, they certainly were not considered to be a legitimate part of the people of Israel (since they had not gone through the conversion ritual).

So, how can we apply this information to our study of Acts 15:1? Since circumcision was the primary component of the conversion ritual and since the men from Judea stated that this is was a “custom” (marking it as something not directly derived from the written Torah), it seems most likely that they were making the argument that unless the Gentile Believers became legal converts (proselytes) they could not be counted among the people of Israel and thus they would not be saved.

With this interpretation, a paraphrase of Acts 15:1 would be:

Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the Gentile Believers, “Unless you legally convert to become a proselyte, according to our legal standard you cannot be saved.” (my paraphrase of Acts 15:1)

With this context in mind, we can see that the Gentile’s relationship to the Torah is not necessarily in view here but instead the question was regarding whether a Gentile had to legally become Jewish in order to be counted as a legitimate part of God’s people. The subsequent ruling of Peter and James in Acts 15 and all of Paul’s letter to Galatians indicates and proves decisively that a Gentile does not have to submit to any legal conversion in order to be considered a legitimate part of Israel but as Paul said in Ephesians, Gentiles, through the blood of Messiah, are “brought near” and are “fellow-citizens, “fellow-heirs, “fellow-members of the body” and “fellow partakers of the promise.”

So, again, the Gentile Believer’s relationship to the Torah is not necessarily in view in Acts 15 or in the Epistle to the Galatians. Regardless, I do not believe that any of the Apostles had a negative view of the Torah. For our purposes, let us examine some key texts to see how the Apostle Paul viewed the Torah.

“I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated under Gamaliel, strictly according to the Torah of our fathers, being zealous for God just as you all are today.” (Acts 22:3)

Paul, in his own personal testimony, declared himself to be a Jew, a Jew with an education! He was educated under the leading sage of his day, Rabbi Gamaliel I, the grandson of Rabbi Hillel. Paul was educated according to the Torah and was zealous for God, just like his Jewish contemporaries. Paul at no point repudiates his Torah education. Though he realized that it afforded him nothing in terms of salvation (cf. Phillipians 3:4-7), he also regarded Jewish Torah education as being advantageous (Romans 3:1-2).

Now when they had traveled through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. And according to Paul’s custom, he went to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, (Acts 17:1-2)

But going on from Perga, they arrived at Pisidian Antioch, and on the Sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down. After the reading of the Torah and the Prophets the synagogue officials sent to them, saying, “Brethren, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, say it.” (Acts 13:14-15)

The book of Acts explicitly tells us that it was Paul’s custom, just as it was his Master Yeshua’s custom, to attend the synagogue on the Sabbath. Notice that Luke (the writer of Acts) does not even call in to question the validity of the Sabbath but simply notes Paul’s custom of attending the synagogue and reasoning from the Scriptures that Yeshua was indeed the promised Messiah. At this point in history, believers were not meeting on Sundays but instead congregated in synagogues along with the rest of the Jewish community on the Sabbath (cf. Acts 15:21).

For Paul had decided to sail past Ephesus so that he would not have to spend time in Asia; for he was hurrying to be in Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost. (Acts 20:16)

Additionally, Paul continued to celebrate God’s Appointed Times. Here in Acts 20:16, we see that Paul was trying to make it to Jerusalem for one of the three pilgrimage festivals, Pentecost (Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks). So, not only did Paul want to keep the Torah festival of Pentecost but he also wanted to celebrate it in Jerusalem, just as the Torah commands.

Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Messiah our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians 5:7-8)

Paul encourages the Believers in Corinth to keep the feast of Passover. Paul uses leaven metaphorically to teach the Believers about sin, a metaphor that would be lost on them if they had not studied and lived out the Torah laws concerned leaven during the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

“But this I admit to you, that according to the Way which they call a sect I do serve the God of our fathers, believing everything that is in accordance with the Torah and that is written in the Prophets.” (Acts 24:14)

Notice the present tense, Paul served God, believing everything that is in accordance with the Torah and the Prophets. This does not sound like the testimony of a man who had abandoned the religious life of the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, it was the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures which Paul had in mind when he wrote:

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

If the Torah was done away with or was not applicable to Gentile Believers then this statement, that “all Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness” would be false. When Paul said “all Scripture” that surely includes the Torah. Therefore, the Torah is inspired by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness. But if this is how Paul viewed the Torah, why is he misunderstood in our day? Well, it wasn’t any better in the first century. Apparently his message that Gentiles need not become legal proselytes was misunderstood to imply that Paul was disregarding the Torah and Jewish law altogether. When Paul reached Jerusalem in Acts 21, he is met by the leader of the Jerusalem community, the brother of Yeshua, Ya’akov, that is, James. It says in Acts 21:20-26:

And when they heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Torah; and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs. What, then, is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. Therefore do this that we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow; take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Torah. (Acts 21:20-26)

If there was ever a time for the other Believers to expose Paul for not being Torah-observant, this was the time. Paul was willing to prove his allegiance to the Torah by paying the expenses — for himself and four other Believers — that accompanied the sacrifices that were to be offered to complete a vow.

Paul obeyed the Torah and expected the readers and hearers of his letters to be Torah-observant as well. Let’s look at several key verses from his letter to the Romans:

For it is not the hearers of the Torah who are just before God, but the doers of the Torah will be justified. (Romans 2:13)

The evidence of a regenerated heart is a life of obedience to the Torah. Those who simply hear the Torah are not those who will be justified, but those who are doers of the Torah will be justified. They will be justified because they are demonstrating in their actions that God had chosen them, redeemed them and gave them the ability, by His Spirit, to live an obedient life.

Do we then nullify the Torah through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Torah. (Romans 3:31)

Though the Gospel message makes no distinction between Jews and Gentiles, this reality does not nullify the Torah. On the contrary, as he had already established in Romans 2:13, our faith should establish the Torah.

For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the Torah of God, for it is not even able to do so, (Romans 8:6-7)

In fact, Paul characterized the unbeliever as one who is not able to submit to the Torah of God, as opposed to believers who live out the requirement of the Torah because they walk by the Spirit, not by the flesh.

So that the requirement of the Torah might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:4)

Paul’s desire was to keep God’s Torah because he recognized that it is holy, righteous and good, as well as spiritual.

For I joyfully concur with the Torah of God in the inner man, (Romans 7:22)

12So then, the Torah is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. 14For we know that the Torah is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. (Romans 7:12, 14)

The evidence from the book of Acts and Paul’s own epistles is that he had a very positive view of the Torah. Simple obedience to the commandments of the Torah was never really in view in these arguments but instead it was the Gentile Believer’s relationship to the Torah via their relationship to the people of Israel that was disputed. With these things in mind, let’s see if we can come to a more reasoned understanding of the epistle to the Galatians.

Part 1 – What is salvation?

Part 2 – How were the people saved before the coming of the Messiah?

I can’t speak for other Torah submissive Believers; I can only speak for myself. Am I endeavouring to learn and obey Torah to get saved? Am I trying to gain God’s favour by trying to keep the Sabbath? Am I scoring some points with God because I’m trying to keep Kosher? Is there any good work that a person can do to gain merit in God’s eyes?

The reality is that our righteousness is like filthy garments to God. It says in Isaiah:

For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. (Isaiah 64:6)

The Apostle Paul teaches that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”(Romans 3:23). In fact, spiritually speaking, “you were dead in your trespasses and sins”(Ephesians 2:1). There is actually nothing that human beings can do to gain favour with God. When it comes to spiritual matters, we’re as good as dead. So, what’s our hope?

Let me just say, God is completely righteous and perfect in judgement and is not obligated to forgive any of us. God would be completely just in condemning each and every one of us; but this is where God’s grace comes in. To display His grace, God has chosen an elect, in every generation, to be transformed and saved. Paul says in Ephesians:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Master Yeshua the Messiah, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the [heavenlies] in Messiah, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Yeshua the Messiah to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3-6)

We’re saved because God planned that we would be saved. Our salvation has absolutely nothing to do with our will. It was God’s will that we be saved. Paul says in Romans:

So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. (Romans 9:16)

It’s because God is merciful and transformed our hearts that we accepted the Good News of the Messiah. It’s not just that God only wanted it to happen; it goes well beyond that. Since we were dead in our sins, there was nothing in ourselves to come to life. God had to be the one to bring us to life. It says in Ephesians:

“…and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Messiah Yeshua” (Ephesians 2:6)

The question then might be asked: “once saved, is it possible to lose your salvation?” The quick answer to that is: “no.” Salvation was never something we earned; God graciously gave it to us. Therefore, we can’t lose our salvation either. There are no good works we can do to earn salvation and there are no evil works we can do to lose our salvation. Salvation would not be by grace if either of those were true! Paul says:

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Instead, the salvation God gives us is one that is based on full assurance. Our hope is that despite what our sinful nature wants us to do (and, sometimes, inevitably causes us to do) we can be assured that we will have a share in the World to Come. Paul puts it this way:

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. (Romans 8:28-30)

God is there orchestrating every step of our salvation. We were dead in our sins but God brought us to life. He worked out the events of our life in such a way that we heard the Good News of the Messiah and because he had brought us to life, we accepted it. This was because He had already predestined that we would accept it. The purpose in God doing all of this is so that we would become conformed to the image of the Messiah. With the ultimate result being that we will be glorified; that is, the resurrection of our bodies in the World to Come.

What does any of this have to do with keeping the Torah? Well, we don’t keep the Torah to be saved or to maintain our salvation. We keep the Torah because God has saved us and because God is our loving Father and we want to obey Him. Every single time we submit to the commandments of God, we’re telling God that we love Him. We are not doing it to gain His favour because we already have His favour. His favour to us is not a result of anything we’ve done, because we don’t deserve any of it. His favour has been bestowed upon us because of Messiah and His work. Furthermore, we do not keep the Torah to maintain His favour. The forgiveness of our sins is based upon the finished work of the Messiah. Messiah’s blood has atoned for all of our sins. There is nothing we can do to add to that.

I ask that those who criticize me about wanting to keep the commandments of Torah to kindly grow up a little bit. Thinking that a Believer has no responsibility to God’s commandments is simply a slippery slope that will just lead to apostasy. God has prepared good works for us to do and they are the commandments of the Torah:

For we are His workmanship, created in the Messiah Yeshua for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome. (1 John 5:3)

Recently, I spent a great deal of time with a Pentecostal group. There were, of course, times when we would pray together and I was reminded of some things that I had thought about in the past in regards to prayer. What I’m about to address brings up many questions regarding the nature of God and what theologians call Christology. Christology is the study of the person of Christ, that is, the Messiah. I by no means think that I have even begun to truly understand the nature of God and the nature of the Messiah. No one fully understands the nature of God. To understand the nature of God would mean that you were on the same level as God. The reason why we don’t understand the nature of God is because we are the creation and He is the Creator. That being said, it is our duty to understand what the Bible says about the nature of God and respond to the truth accordingly.

What I want to address is the manner in which we are to pray, specifically if we should pray to Yeshua. Some Christians have never even questioned whether or not it’s appropriate to pray to Jesus. This would be because the doctrine of the Trinity clearly teaches that there are three persons that make up the one God. Jesus would be what they call “God, the Son,” and therefore it would be perfectly permissible to pray to Jesus as it would be to pray to the Father. In addition to this, I’ve noticed that even within the same prayer some will begin to pray to the Father and then speak as if they are speaking to Jesus. This seems odd to me because even though most Christians understand the three persons of the Trinity to be one, the actual doctrine of the Trinity teaches that the three are distinct persons. In other words, the average Christian might begin their prayer addressing the Father (“Father, thank you…”) but at some point in their prayer, they will speak as if they are speaking to Jesus (“when you were here on earth you died for our sins…”). Some even sporadically interchange the phrases “Lord God” and “Lord Jesus” (“Thank you Lord God, for all that you’ve done, O Lord Jesus, thank you for being with us.”)

It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain how I understand the nature of God and the Messiah. I reject the traditional understanding or at least the wording of the doctrine of the Trinity. The word “trinity” is not found in the Bible and neither is the concept that God is three persons. The traditional Trinitarian doctrines are not Biblical in the sense that they are not concepts directly taught in the Bible. Instead, the doctrine of the Trinity is simply man’s attempt at unravelling the mystery of the nature of God. I have taken the approach that many in the Messianic Torah movement have in regard to defining the nature of God; I only use Biblical language. For example, the Bible never explicitly states that Yeshua is God but it does say:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 14)

So, it is Biblical to say that I believe Yeshua is the Word of God in the form of a human being. When God’s Word became a human being, did God cease being the omnipresent God? No, of course not! The Apostle Paul says that Yeshua is the “image of the invisible God.” Is the image of something the actual thing itself? 

The Bible offers hardly any explanation in regards to God’s and Messiah’s ontological nature. Instead, the Bible describes God’s nature by using terms that describe what He has done and what He will do (“Creator,” “Healer,” “Ruler,” etc) and Yeshua is described by terms that describe who He is and what He has done (“Master,” “Saviour,” “Redeemer,” etc). One detail that we know for sure: God is spirit and cannot be seen (John 4:24, John 1:18). In a mysterious way, though, the Bible also states that God has appeared to people (Genesis 12:7, Exodus 24:10). Take for instance, the burning bush that appeared to Moses. The burning bush spoke as God and yet we know that the burning bush itself was not not God. Rather, it was an earthly expression of God’s voice. It was a way for God to interact with humanity. God interacting with humanity this way in no way diminishes the reality that God is omnipresent and transcends everything in our reality. He is the Creator and therefore is outside of all space, time and matter.

What does all of this have to do with the way we pray? It’s my opinion, and I could be wrong on this, but I don’t believe it’s appropriate to pray to Yeshua. This in no way diminishes the Apostolic teaching that He is the Word made flesh (John 1:14), the glory of God (2 Corinthians 4:6), the image of the unseen God (Colossians 1:15) and that the fullness of Deity dwells in Him in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). Rather, it’s to simply place things in their proper perspective. As much as the above quotations are true, the Apostles also teach that Yeshua is fully human. It says in 1 John:

“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Yeshua the Messiah has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Yeshua [came in the flesh] is not from God; this is the spirit of the anti-Christ…” (1 John 4:2-3)

And the epistle to the Hebrews says:

“He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.” (Hebrews 2:17-18)

There is no way to separate the man Yeshua from His divine attributes. What that means is that even if a Christian understands that they are not praying to Jesus as a man, they are praying to Him as God, they are still, in reality praying to a man.

In the Apostolic Scriptures, there is no instruction to pray to Yeshua. Instead, we have the teaching of Yeshua Himself on how to pray. He says:

“Pray, then, in this way: ’Our Father who is in heaven,” (Matthew 6:9)

It would be prudent for us to carefully choose our words when we pray. The Master would have us pray to His Father, not to Him. This does not deny or diminish the amazing reality that Yeshua is the Word made flesh. It will simply make our prayers more Biblical and that really should be the goal of all of our actions.

Perhaps on the surface, this theological paradigm makes everything fit together but when put under scrutiny it betrays some major deficiencies. In the following survey of the different facets of this theology, I’m not going to hold back. The following views (which are in bold) are what dispensationalists believe once you strip off the theological jargon:

There are two ways of salvation.

No sincere Christian would actually intentionally confess this to be true but whether they know it or not most Christians believe this is true. For example, when a traditional Christian is confronted with the commandment of the Sabbath, sometimes the response is “well, we have Jesus, so we don’t need to keep the Sabbath.” What is this response implying? It’s implying that the people before the coming of the Messiah were not saved through His work on the cross. It implies that the people before the coming of Messiah kept the Sabbath and the rest of the Torah for their salvation. This is a serious and frightening implication! This perspective implies that God was able to save people apart from the sacrifice of the Messiah. If that’s true, then why did God send the Messiah to die? If there was something that man could have done to attain salvation, then Messiah died needlessly!

The truth is that faith in the Messiah has always been God’s way of salvation. The promise of the coming redeemer has been revealed since the beginning and God has always graciously chosen an elect in each generation to be saved. What this means is that the Torah was not given for salvation. The Torah instructs us on what is right and wrong and is our guide for holy living.

The Holy Spirit was not active in salvation previous to Acts 2.

No one who reads the Hebrew Scriptures can actually say that the Holy Spirit wasn’t active in the lives of God’s faithful. Since it is so evident, most Christians would say that while the Holy Spirit was active in the lives of people before the coming of Jesus, He didn’t come to “live inside” Believers until the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. This notion is consistent with the previous notion that people before the coming of Jesus were not saved by faith in Him. That being said, just as the notion that the people before the coming of Jesus were not saved in Him is false, so is the idea that the Spirit of God was not active in salvation previous to the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. Salvation is realized in the life of an individual only through the work of the Holy Spirit. 

It’s the Spirit of God that regenerates our heart and reveals our sinfulness. It’s the Spirit of God that reveals to us our need for the Saviour and leads us to the Messiah. It’s the Spirit of God that illuminates the Scriptures to us and enables us to obey His commandments. Without the work of the Spirit of God, no one would could be saved. So, that being said, all one has to do is examine the lives of the faithful before the coming of Jesus and see if they exhibit the characteristics of a regenerated individual. Did the faithful of the Hebrew Scriptures know their own sinfulness? Did they know they needed a saviour? Did they place their faith in God’s coming Redeemer? Did they know the Word of God and submit their lives to it? The obvious answer to all of the above is “yes!” The truth is that the Holy Spirit was active in the lives of the faithful before the coming of Jesus, both for salvation and for empowerment.

Israel and the Church are completely distinct.

This perspective is so prevalent in our thinking and especially in our interpretation of the Bible that it’s amazing that nowhere in the Bible is this notion stated. In other words, nowhere in the Bible is it ever stated that God has two separate groups of people that He calls His own. The problem with believing that Israel and the Church are distinct is that God has only made covenants with Israel. Israel is made up of the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God made a covenant with Abraham, later confirmed through Isaac and Jacob, where their descendants will forever be God’s people. The Mosaic covenant was added to give Israel instructions on how to obey God and to provide a litmus test through which God could either bless or punish Israel. The Davidic covenant promised a king that would forever reign over Israel. Finally, the New Covenant is an, as of yet, unfulfilled promise that He will change the hearts of the entire nation and make them obedient. There are no covenants made with an entity called “the Church.” 

Not only that, Jesus and the Apostles considered themselves to be faithful Jews within the larger scope of the people of Israel. The Apostles and the Apostolic community never abandoned the Jewish people and continued to practice Judaism as taught and lived out by Jesus. Additionally, Paul clearly teaches that Gentile Believers do not make up a new group of elect but rather join the faithful remnant of Israel through their faith in the Messiah.

The word “church” simply means “assembly” or “community.” So, while the word “ecclesia” is used many times in the writings of the Apostles, it should not necessarily be taken in a technical sense. Usually the word is used to simply refer to an assembly of Believers. Even when it appears to be used in a technical sense, it simply refers to the community of Believers who make up the faithful remnant of Israel. This means that the “church” is the faithful remnant of believing Jews within Israel and those Gentiles who, by faith, are joined to Israel, specifically that faithful remnant.

The New Covenant is something that started with the death of Jesus and doesn’t include the Torah.

In the Bible, the New Covenant is never defined as something that started with the coming of Jesus and doesn’t include the Torah. The New Covenant is defined in the Prophets, specifically in the book of Jeremiah. The New Covenant speaks of the time when the Messiah has returned and has gathered Israel to the Land. God will miraculously change the hearts of the entire nation which will result in that they will be obedient to the Torah. This obviously has not happened yet.

The reality of the New Covenant is simply what Christians know as salvation. In other words, the New Covenant is a national expression of what the faithful remnant of Israel has experienced in every generation. The main characteristic of the New Covenant is the change God makes in His people; forgiving them of their sins and enabling them to live in obedience to His commandments.

There exists something called an Old Covenant.

The term “old covenant” is found only once in the entire Bible. The term was invented by the Apostle Paul to describe the Torah when it is read by a Jewish person who does not have faith in the Messiah. The word “old,” when used in Paul’s epistles commonly refers to a person or state before faith. The “old self” refers to an individual’s state before coming to faith in the Messiah. The “old covenant” is the Torah read without faith while the reality of the New Covenant is the Torah written on the heart because of faith. The “old covenant” does not refer to the time before the coming of Jesus. The term “old covenant” refers to a participant of the Mosaic covenant (a Jewish person) who doesn’t have faith and won’t have a share in the coming New Covenant.

Paul is able to trump the Tanakh in terms of authority.

The response to Torah submissive Believers’ exhortation to other Believers that they should be keeping the Torah is usually “I know the Law says ‘that’ but didn’t Paul say we don’t have to?” In other words, according to this perspective, Paul is more authoritative than the Tanakh. Are Paul’s writings more authoritative than the Torah? Can a later revelation from God trump a previous revelation from God?

The reality is that a later revelation of God cannot contradict or trump an earlier revelation from God. This is why Christians do not accept the Book of Mormon or the Koran. If we really believe that the writings of the Apostles, specifically Paul, contradict the Torah then how are they any different from the Book of Mormon?

Paul constantly quotes the Tanakh to validate his arguments and teaching. Not only that, throughout Romans and various other places, Paul exhorts Believers to keep the commandments of God and teaches that those who walk by the Spirit will submit to the Torah of God. When reading Paul’s letters, we must work hard to find the context of his arguments and teachings so that we will be able to properly interpret his words. Paul does not contradict or teach against the Torah.

Only the New Testament applies to Believers.

Many Christians believe that only the commandments that are explicitly repeated in the New Testament apply to Christians. This implies that only the writings of the Apostles applies to Christians, whereas the Tanakh does not. This essentially means that Hebrew Scriptures, while at one time authoritative, no longer carries the same weight of authority as it once did.

Is this really treating the Hebrew Scriptures as the Word of God? If something comes from God, then doesn’t that mean it cannot change, since the speaker, God Himself, cannot change? Not only that, this perspective ignores the fact that the Jesus and the Apostolic communities of His followers did not have the New Testament. The Bible of the first century Believers was the Tanakh. The Scriptures to which Paul refers to as God-breathed was the Tanakh. The Tanakh was authoritative to Jesus, the Apostles and all of the Apostolic communities of the first century. Shouldn’t it be just as authoritative to us? 

Jesus and the Apostles began a new religion distinct from Judaism.

Ether Jesus and the Apostles indeed came to start a new religion called Christianity or they continued to practice Judaism and expected us to as well. If followers of Jesus are not a separate group of elect but are rather a part of the elect of Israel, shouldn’t we follow the religion that God expects Israel to keep?

The reality is that Jesus and the Apostles kept the Sabbath and Appointed Times of Leviticus. They prayed daily in the Temple and worshipped in the synagogues. They wore tassels and kept kosher. They considered themselves to be the elect sect with Israel. They practiced a reform of Second Temple Judaism. Shouldn’t we be practicing a modern form of that?

Conclusions

If virtually every aspect of Dispensation Theology is faulty, shouldn’t it be abandoned? There are no such thing as dispensations! God is the same yesterday, today and forever. Here are some truths:

• Salvation has always been a matter of God’s grace received by faith in the Messiah.
• The Holy Spirit has always been active in the work of salvation in God’s people.
• God’s people are still Israel and Gentile Believers, through faith in the Messiah, are made citizens in Israel.
• The New Covenant is a coming national reality expressed in each generation through Israel’s remnant.
• The Old Covenant refers to the Torah only when it is read by a person without faith.
• Revelation begins with and builds upon the Torah; later revelation cannot contradict the Torah.
• The whole Bible is equally authoritative for Believers.
• Jesus and the Apostles practiced a form of second Temple Judaism.

Firstly, let me point out that I grew up in a Pentecostal church. Growing up, I was proud to be Pentecostal. I was always intrigued with people speaking in tongues and being “slain in the Spirit.” When God radically changed me in the spring of 2004, I became even more zealous for all things Pentecostal. When I read 1 Corinthians 14, I did what most Pentecostals do, I assumed that the modern day “tongues” phenomenon was what was happening in Corinth. Within the paradigm of this interpretation, I eagerly desired to speak in tongues (as it would seem Paul indicated in 1 Corinthians 14:1). Within a couple of months, I began to speak in tongues. At first it was few “words” but it eventually developed into a couple of different patterns. I was completely sincere and I genuinely thought that the Holy Spirit was speaking through me.

Within the past couple of years, though, as I’ve begun to study the pertinent passages a little more deeply, I’ve stumbled upon a couple of things that makes this “tongues” experience inconsistent with the Bible. Let’s begin in Acts 2, and see if we can figure this out.

Acts 2:1-3

1When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.

Firstly, it’s generally assumed among Pentecostal interpreters that this event took place in the upper room described in Acts 1. This was probably not the case. According to verse 15, it was the third hour of the day (that is, roughly 9AM). It’s my contention that this event took place in theTemple precincts. Since this was the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), it would seem logical that the disciples were gathered with the rest of Israel, at theTemple, for prayer during the morning sacrifice. This is why 3000 could be added to the Assembly of Believers (verse 41).

3And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. 4And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.

The “tongues as of fire” harkens back to the rabbinic legend that at the very first Pentecost, at Sinai when God gave the Ten Commandments, sparks rested on the Israelites and each spoke the commandments in the different languages of the world. Another thing we should note is that the word “tongues” is simply the old English way of saying “languages.” There’s really no reason to translate it as “tongues” other than to maintain the notion that the modern day “tongues” phenomenon is Biblical.

5Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. 6And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language.

Luke describes that there were devout Jews from all over the world gathered there. This is because Pentecost is one of the three pilgrimage festivals that the Torah requires all Israelite males to celebrate in Jerusalem. Notice that each heard the disciples speaking in their own language. While the disciples’ speaking in other languages was supernatural, the act of hearing and understanding these words by the crowd was not supernatural. Each person in the crowd was simply able to discern certain of the disciples speaking in their native language. (Actually, not everyone there was able to hear something in their native language but we’ll get to that in a moment).

7They were amazed and astonished, saying, “Why, are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  8″And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born  9″Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs–we hear them in our own tongues speaking of the mighty deeds of God.”

The crowd was astonished because they knew that most of the disciples were Galileans and obviously could not have been speaking all of these different languages. Luke takes the time to describe all of the different languages being spoken (or at least the regions from which the languages came from). Each from these regions heard the disciples speaking “the mighty deeds of God” in their own language. So, let me reiterate, the disciples were empowered to speak real, human languages. There’s no indication that they were speaking anything but languages of the known world.

12And they all continued in amazement and great perplexity, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13But others were mocking and saying, “They are full of sweet wine.”

Notice the contrast of those in the crowds. Many were astonished and later came to faith in Yeshua as Messiah after Peter’s sermon. Others though, who obviously hadn’t heard anything in their own language, assumed the disciples were drunk. This contrast is important point to consider later when we take a look at 1 Corinthians 14.

Conclusions So Far

The disciples were supernaturally empowered to speak in languages they could not previously speak. All of the languages spoken were known languages, specifically known by the people in the crowd. Again, there were people present who could understand what was being said and the actual act of listening and understanding was completely natural. There’s no indication that the Believers were able to continue to speak in different languages after this point. It’s my opinion that this event was simply a sign to Israel that God had placed His power upon the disciples. Those that had faith, joined the disciples. Those didn’t have faith, scoffed and didn’t join the disciples. Additionally, notice that the ability to speak in different languages was not the motivating factor for the 3000 to place their faith in Yeshua, rather it was the sermon Peter presented, which he spoke in the common language. The ability to speak in different languages was merely the sign that intrigued and gathered the crowd.

Acts 10:44-48

44While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who were listening to the message. 45All the circumcised (Jewish) believers who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. 46For they were hearing them speaking with tongues and exalting God. Then Peter answered, 47″Surely no one can refuse the water for these to be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we did, can he ” 48And he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked him to stay on for a few days.

Apparently, a mini “Acts 2″ experience happened again in the home of Cornelius. This time, God supernaturally empowered these new Gentile Believers to speak in different languages. Whereas in Acts 2, the sign of speaking in different languages affected those outside of the Assembly of Believers, it would seem that this time the sign of speaking of different languages was sent for the Believers. In other words, God enabled the new Gentile Believers to speak in different languages to show the Jewish Believers that God had accepted them. There’s no indication of what kind of languages the new Gentile Believers were speaking. We must assume that, like in Acts 2, they were speaking in known languages and, specifically, languages that the disciples the Jewish Believers knew. For example, Cornelius and the rest of the new Gentile Believers probably spoke Greek but it’s possible God empowered them to speak fluent Hebrew and Aramaic, since these would be languages the Jewish Believers would have known.

Acts 19:5-6

5When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking with tongues and prophesying.

Apparently, some disciples of John the Baptist did not make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pentecost. (It’s possible that John and his disciples were a part of the Essene sect which specifically did not associate with anything Temple related as they felt the priesthood was corrupt). Nevertheless, Paul laid his hands and God yet again showed that His favour was upon those that believed in Yeshua as Messiah by empowering these new disciples of Yeshua to speak in different languages. Once again, we are given no indication of what kind of languages were spoken but if this event is to be taken as another mini “Acts 2″ experience, then that would mean they spoke languages that someone within hearing distance could understand.

Conclusions So Far

These are the only 3 instances in the book of Acts where “tongues” is even mentioned. It’s clear that the phenomenon that happened in Acts 2 was a supernatural experience where the disciples were enabled to speak in real but foreign (to them) languages. Those that had faith understood what was being spoken (depending on the language) and those didn’t have faith didn’t understand and scoffed at the event. A similar event happened two more times, apparently to serve the same purpose: that God was working among the followers of Yeshua. We are given no indication that the this phenomenon continued to happen (though it could have). Additionally, it would appear that people were only able to speak in different languages when God made it happened. It would appear that the disciples could not willfully “speak in tongues” as they pleased. Also, never did the disciples seek to speak in tongues, all 3 instances show that the phenomenon happens as God wills.

1 Corinthians 12:4-11

4Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord. 6There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons.  

I would say that it’s safe to assume that the upcoming list of gifts, ministries and effects is not exhaustive. Not only that, it’s my contention that these gifts, ministries and effects are not necessarily supernatural in every sense of the word. I will elaborate on that thought as we look at each gift.

7But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

These manifestations of the Spirit are for the common good. There may be personal benefit but the goal of the manifestations is for the group not the individual.

8For to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, and to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit;

There is no reason to believe that Paul is only referring to receiving a “word of wisdom” and a “word of knowledge” in a spontaneous sort of way. In other words, Paul could simply be referring to people who, through study and experience, has been given the ability to have more wisdom and knowledge than others. As we’ll see, each of the gifts listed in this chapter can be supernatural gifts or natural gifts used by or for the Spirit.

9to another faith by the same Spirit, and to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10and to another the effecting of miracles, and to another prophecy, and to another the distinguishing of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues.

Faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, distinguishing of spirits, speaking in different languages and interpreting different languages can all be results of a supernatural and spontaneous working of the Spirit. That being said, each of these gifts could be things inherent in an individual that the Spirit simply uses or amplifies. Some people have a tendency to show more faith and some people are more knowledgeable in the area of what’s good for the body (that is, gifts of healing). Effecting of miracles would seem to weigh more on the supernatural side but there is a natural aspect to every miracle. Prophecy, as we’ll see in 1 Corinthians 14, is not always a spontaneous prediction of the future. Prophecy could simply refer to “a discourse emanating from divine inspiration and declaring the purposes of God…” Distinguishing of spirits does not completely rely on a spontaneous revelation from God but can certainly stem from simply knowing God’s Word and making appropriate distinctions. Speaking in different languages and interpreting languages can obviously be completely natural. It’s when a person speaks of the things of God that it becomes spiritual. Whether one is speaking in a foreign language or interpreting that language into the common language, if you are speaking of the things of God, then it becomes a spiritual gift.

11But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as He wills.

God enables people in each of these areas as He wills. The above list is not exhaustive of the “gifts of the Spirit.” There is more to the life of the Believer within the assembly but this just what Paul, inspired by the Spirit, wrote in this epistle.

1 Corinthians 14

1Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy. 2For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries.

“Prophecy” refers to clear exhortation in the language that all in the assembly understand. “Tongue” literally refers to “a language” but here specifically refers to a language that the majority does not understand. Speaking in a language that the majority does not understand is like blowing into the air. The word “spirit” is the Greek word “pneuma” and could also be translated as “breath.” Therefore, that line could be translated “in his breath he speaks mysteries.” That is, he speaks the mysteries of the word of God in a language the majority does not understand and therefore is no different than blowing into the air. So, if the person is speaking in a language no one understands, God does but the people don’t.

3But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation. 4One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself; but one who prophesies edifies the church.

Paul, here, clearly defines prophecy as something that people understand and it’s for edification, exhortation and consolation. Speaking in a language that only the speaker understands can only edify the person speaking but speaking in a language everyone understands edifies the whole assembly.

5Now I wish that you all spoke in tongues, but even more that you would prophesy; and greater is one who prophesies than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets, so that the church may receive edifying.

Speaking in different languages (perhaps Hebrew is in view ) is not bad but it does not benefit a congregation that doesn’t speak in that language.

6But now, brethren, if I come to you speaking in tongues, what will I profit you unless I speak to you either by way of revelation or of knowledge or of prophecy or of teaching?

Speaking to someone in a language they don’t understand does not profit anything. Things like revelation, knowledge, prophecy and doctrine; all things relating to intelligently understanding something are things that profit.

7Yet even lifeless things, either flute or harp, in producing a sound, if they do not produce a distinction in the tones, how will it be known what is played on the flute or on the harp?  8For if the bugle produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare himself for battle  

Paul’s point is that sound needs to have meaning to be understood. Random noise doesn’t communicate a message.

9So also you, unless you utter by the tongue speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken?  For you will be speaking into the air.

Here Paul brings up the point that speaking in a language that no one understands is just like blowing into the air.

10There are, perhaps, a great many kinds of languages in the world, and no kind is without meaning. 11If then I do not know the meaning of the language, I will be to the one who speaks a barbarian, and the one who speaks will be a barbarian to me.

Paul compares the situation to barbarians speaking. Speaking to someone in a language they don’t understand doesn’t communicate any meaning to them; it might as well be a barbarian speaking.

12So also you, since you are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek to abound for the edification of the church. 13Therefore let one who speaks in a tongue pray that he may interpret.

It’s fine to be zealous for gifting that the Spirit can give you or strengthen but the goal should be to excel at edifying the assembly. If a person does speak in a language that most don’t understand, he should seek that God give them the ability to translate it to assembly. I believe this not only refers to translating the words themselves but the meaning of what he is saying. To put it another way: some people have the ability to speak in a different language but might not be able to convey to the assembly, by way of translation, the deep nuances and intricacies of the language they were speaking.

14For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.

Again, the word “spirit” here could simply be referring to “breath.” If Paul were to pray in the assembly in a language that nobody understands, he is legitimately praying, but the meaning of what he is saying will have been lost on the rest of the assembly. The stress is not what the individual praying is getting but rather what the assembly is getting. This is the context as he keeps on saying that praying in an unknown language doesn’t edify the assembly. A paraphrase of this verse would be: “if I pray in a language the majority of the assembly does not understand then physically speaking I’m praying but the assembly won’t be able to understand what I’m saying.”

15What is the outcome then?  I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also; I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the mind also.

I always took this as him making a distinction between sprit and understanding but he’s actually saying that he will not only pray with his breath (that is, the physical act of speaking something) but breath and understanding at the same time. That’s a long way of saying “speaking in the language everybody understands.

16Otherwise if you bless in the spirit only, how will the one who fills the place of the ungifted say the “Amen” at your giving of thanks, since he does not know what you are saying? 

In the context of a synagogue prayer service, this makes a lot of sense. The prayers of the synagogue contain many points where an “amen” is required. If you are not praying in a language people will understand then no one will be able to say the “amen” when appropriate. To “bless in the spirit” is to bless in language the majority does not understand and so, to them, only the breath (“spirit”) is praying.

17For you are giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not edified.

The person praying the prayers is actually praying and is legitimately giving thanks but the others are not being edified because they cannot understand the language being used.

18I thank God, I speak in tongues more than you all; 19however, in the church I desire to speak five words with my mind so that I may instruct others also, rather than ten thousand words in a tongue.

Paul could speak in many languages (at least Hebrew and Greek) but he declared that he would rather speak in 5 words that people could understand than a zillion words that people could not understand. Notice how he says “my mind” but he’s referring to having other people understand.

20Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature. 21In the Law it is written, “BY MEN OF STRANGE TONGUES AND BY THE LIPS OF STRANGERS I WILL SPEAK TO THIS PEOPLE, AND EVEN SO THEY WILL NOT LISTEN TO ME,” says the Lord.

“In your thinking,” I believe, refers not to the person doing the thinking but the person doing the speaking. In other words, in the way we speak, we are not to be as children. We are to speak like intelligent men. He uses a quote from Isaiah 28:10-11 to teach that hearing and not understanding a foreign language is a sign of God’s judgment. For during the exile, the Israelites could not understand their captors.

22So then tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe but to unbelievers; but prophecy is for a sign, not to unbelievers but to those who believe.

Notice he says “are for a sign” and yet he’s making his point based on Isaiah 28’s use of real, human foreign languages. His point is that people speaking in different languages and not understanding is a sign that there is unbelief and God’s subsequent judgement. Speaking in the understood language (prophecy), on the other hand, is sign of belief and, hopefully, blessing.

23Therefore if the whole church assembles together and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad  24But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an ungifted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all; 25the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you.

To understand verses 23-25 we can use the event that took place on Pentecost in Acts 2. Those who did not understand what was going on (that is, didn’t understand anything in their own language), were the unbelievers. They scoffed at what was going on, even though the disciples were indeed speaking the truth (albeit in a bunch of different languages). On the other hand, those that understood (and to them that would have been equivalent to prophecy) were the ones who believed.

26What is the outcome then, brethren?  When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation; let all things be done for edification.

This is actually a rebuke of how the Corinthians were conducting their services. Paul now gives his instructions on how he would want the services to be conducted.

27If anyone speaks in a tongue, it should be by two or at the most three, and each in turn, and one must interpret; 28but if there is no interpreter, he must keep silent in the church; and let him speak to himself and to God.

If one wishes to speak in a different language in the assembly, Paul limits the amount of people doing this to 3. This is tricky to understand because why would people want to speak in a different language in the assembly  My best guess is that these are Jewish believers who wanted to conduct some of the service in Hebrew. If there was no one to interpret the meaning of what the speaker is saying then speaking in a different language should not be done.

29Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others pass judgment. 30But if a revelation is made to another who is seated, the first one must keep silent. 31For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be exhorted; 32and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets;

The teaching is to be done also by only 2 or 3. What is taught is to be judged and scrutinized. Additionally, there is to be order and control in the assembly.

33for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.

Speaking in different languages with no one understanding does not come from God. God is not the author of confusion as Paul clearly states.

Conclusions

In the book of Acts, there are 3 instances recorded where God supernaturally empowered disciples of Yeshua to speak in foreign languages. The Acts 2 account explicitly shows that the languages spoken were real, human languages. Both subsequent occurrences (in Acts 10 and 19) are simply described as “speaking in tongues” and therefore the argument from silence would indicate that theses occurrences were also real, human languages. There is also no indication by Luke that this event continued to happen or was something that was “practiced” by the Believers.

The mention of “tongues” in 1 Corinthians 12 could simply be referring to speaking in different languages and the interpretation of those languages. Similarly, the “tongues” spoken of throughout 1 Corinthians 14 seem to simply be referring to people within an assembly speaking the word of God in a language foreign to the majority. This is contrasted with “prophecy” which seems to be referring to the the proclamation of the word of God, either through teaching or prayer, in the commonly understood language.

The modern day “tongues” phenomenon, as I have seen and personally experienced, is usually a “language” being spoken which no one can understood, including the speaker. I would characterize the modern day “tongues” phenomenon as, at “best,” extra-biblical and, at worst, unbiblical. Each instance of “tongues” in the Bible either explicitly or implicitly refers to real, human languages with at least one person understanding what was spoken. When a person speaks in modern “tongues” it is usually nothing more than giberish and rarely conveys any sense of syntax. This would place the practice of modern “tongues” as extra-biblical.

Additionally, there is no way to test what is spoken when somebody “speaks in tongues.” If neither the speaker nor the listener know what is being said, then how will anyone know if what is being spoken is from God or not? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that “no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Yeshua is accursed”; and no one can say, “Yeshua is Master,” except by the Holy Spirit.” but if no one understands what is being said how can one discern if it’s from the Spirit of God or not? More often than not, modern “tongues” is simply something that the speaker has been psychologically trained to do but there is the possibility of demonic activity. Since there is no way to know what is being spoken, then how do we know whether one is blessing or cursing God?

It is my opinion, based upon the pertinent texts studied above that Believers engaging in the modern “tongues” phenomenon should stop this practice. Even if one believes that the “tongues” being spoken today could be a real, human language, unless someone is present in the assembly to understand, it should not be spoken. At the very least, Paul’s instruction that, at the most, only 3 speak in a different language and one after the other. If there is no one present who actually understands the language, then the “tongues” speakers should not continue to speak.